GlitchNYC.com

The GlitchCast

I've had several ideas for podcasts brewing for months, and I've finally gotten the first one together. The GlitchCast is a podcast that will feature new and independent music. I'll be playing the best stuff I can find on the podsafe music network and encouraging independent artists to put their stuff up there so everyone can play it.

It's already working! I've gotten the amazing Edie Carey to upload her songs and I'm working with Candid (who I interviewed in the second episode) to get their best stuff up there for people to play. I've also got some crazy ideas about getting comedians to upload their performances to the podsafe music network for podcasters to play, and I'm already working with quite a few here in New York towards that end.

If you're sick of radio and want to find some new, indpendent music, then this show is for you, especially if you're running your own podcast. Everyone I play and feature on this show will be podsafe!

Check it out at http://www.glitchnyc.com/GlitchCast or you can subscribe to the feed here. I recommend "iPodder Lemon" automatically downloading your podcasts.

6:40 pm | permalink | /technology/podcasting | 0 writebacks |

Firefox Hits 100 Million Downloads

Congratulations to the amazing team at SpreadFirefox.com and the developers of Firefox. They've hit 100,000,000 downloads, and 1.0 hasn't even been out for a year.

We ran our NYTimes ad back in December of last year, when we had around 10 million downloads and the uptake has continued to accelerate ever since. Yes there have been several revision to Firefox, and updates are counted as downloads, but this is still a staggering number of people using and downloading a program.

If you're not using Firefox yet, go get it now. It's better, it's more secure (sick of spyware yet?), and it will always be free.

3:16 pm | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

Getting it Out There

I've been listening to C.C. Chapman's Accident Hash, a new indie music Podcast, for a few months now. He describes his show as "the best mix in podsafe music" and boy is he right. My musical tastes are fairly varied, but I certainly found myself liking his "mellow" themed shows a bit more than his normal all over the map mix.

So when C.C. launched U-Turn cafe, a podcast with nothing but chilled, mellow music, I was psyched. Listening to the first few shows, I heard his call for artists to sit down with a guitar and a mic and just record something raw and fresh, and well, I went and got myself inspired.

Saturday night, I fired up my iRiver 899 and sang + played my heart out. The result is undoubtedly the most professional recording I've ever managed. This is slightly ironic because it was done in 1 shot with a small mic and a little device, rather than the hundreds of dollars of recording equipment I have ready for the task, and the hours I usually spend futilely trying to get a good mix.

I've also gotten in touch with some of my favorite indie artists to encourage them to join the podsafe music network and get their music out there for anyone to play. Edie Carey has taken me up on my suggestion, and her amazing music is now available there. Anyone can go take a listen, and podcasters can download her tracks to play on their show!

I sent C.C. my song with a quick message attached, and pointed him to Edie's music, wasn't sure if I'd get a reply. After all, C.C. is a very busy guy. Was I ever ecstatic when I read his email:

Ok dude, there is WAY to much goodness in this one single e-mail.

Thank you for it all. Everything is perfect.

I checked out Edie's music last night. I was editing together all sorts of music segments that will be played on IT Conversations stream of the Pop!Tech conference so I made sure to get her in there so that she'd have her first play and thus start showing up in the Featured Artist rotation on the site. Damn is she talented.

Now I need to find some time to do another u-Turn. I'm getting such great music!

I LOVE what you did with your whole intro and then the song. I need more people to do that.

PERFECT! Thank you!

-C.C.

That email made my morning.

Now, I realize, I have to get things ready around here - I don't even have a proper music page to point people to!

3:51 pm | permalink | /life/music | 0 writebacks |

Cool Katamari Tee in Pre-Orders

After spending most of last weekend playing Katamari Damacy I had to preorder one of these t-shirts depicting the Prince and his rolling ball, with the caption, "This is how I roll."

Katamari Damacy is the most inventive and addicting game I've played for the PS2 and this amazingly designed shirt is, as Cory Doctorow calls it "A true nerd pride item", but they won't manufacture it unless they get enough pre-orders.

Link (via BoingBoing)

9:15 am | permalink | /technology/games | 0 writebacks |

"From here on in, I shoot without a script."

The Rock Opera "RENT" defined a portion of my life. It led me to an understanding of the world around me, and of myself, that may have taken me years longer to come to on my own. Silly and trite as it seems to feel this connected to a musical, the abstraction of themes and emotions through music allows you to imprint on a story in ways that you simply can't with words alone.

Everyone affected by RENT has their own stories, and feels their own personal connection to the words, the music, and the feelings that they evoke. It's as much a story about love and life, as it is about grief and loss. It's also a connection to who you were when you first really heard it, and first felt these things with the characters.

Not your average musical.

Over the years, I've drifted from the theatre, especially from the musical theatre, and RENT has become somewhat of a footnote in my past.

When I heard that the movie was being made, 9 years late, I was more than just miffed. I was virulently angry. They'd taken a young, twenty-something cast and let them become thirty somethings. They'd replaced the spit-fire Mimi and left everyone else in, trying to play "young." I'm still a big fan of Anthony Rapp and Taye Diggs, but Adam Pascal is the consumate tool now; a Broadway pretty boy.

So when I watched the trailer tonight, I was not expecting this. I was not expecting to be taken back 10 years.

I was not expecting to be moved.

They'd taken moments, tiny moments from the show, and expanded them into heart-wrenching images.

The loss is so tangible, so real, even in just these 2 minutes, that you can't help but feel for this little family.

Watching some of the videos on the rent blog I suddenly understood why so many of the original cast were returning. They simply couldn't let this story go. They had so much to say, so much to bring to it, that they had to see it through. For the first time in 9 years, they were finally able to finish the story that Jonathan Larson left unwritten when he passed.

The cast has been documenting the process on the blog the entire way through shooting, and hearing them talk about their characters and what they hoped to accomplish with this film has brought me full circle. I am now more excited about this than any other movie in the next year.

Add to that the fact that listening to RENT has been synonymous with Thanksgiving for my best friend and I since 1996 (and he is *not* a fan of musicals) and that the movie is coming out November 23rd. I will see this movie the day before thanksgiving, barring an act of god.

• Watch the "Seasons of Love" Trailer at the Rent Myspace page
• See the short "teaser trailer" at the official site
• Watch the full movie trailer at apple
• Watch lots of cast documentary and interview videos at the RentMovieBlog

11:00 am | permalink | /technology/film | 0 writebacks |

How Eric Got His Game Back

Okay. I'll admit it. I don't play video games.

There. I said it.

I'm a supergeek who hates halo. I'm the sole square-enix fan that has yet to finish Final Fantasy 7 let alone any of the games that followed. I'm the only dork more likely to win the Olympic gold in high-jumping* than to frag someone in quake deathmatch.

I just don't have the time.

I live to create, to be productive. If I'm sitting in front of a 70 hour RPG, I know exactly where those 70 hours are going, and the sound of the "Toilet of Lost Time" flushing haunts me every minute I play.

If I'm in front of my computer, at least then I'm trying to get something done, even if it doesn't always work out that way.

This isn't the way it's always been. I grew up loving every game I could get my hands on. It didn't matter if it was even fun, I played it for the sheer love of playing. I spent a great deal of my childhood in front of my 8-bit altar, and my first true geek "call-for-help" was to walk a friend through the second quest of the Legend of Zelda.

Sometimes I miss the hours spent in front of my games with no thoughts of what I could, or should be doing. Don't get me wrong, I still love a good game when there is company around, but then it's a social activity, something to do while hanging out.

No, if I was going to really enjoy solitary gaming again, I needed to find some time that was already wasted and idle. Time when I really had nothing better to do.

How much does it cost to get your childhood back?

Eighty Dollars.

I got a Game Boy Advance SP last Christmas, and I've played it every day on the subway since. I've got absolutely nowhere to be, except on that train. No one is waiting, there's noting better I could be doing. It's the perfect subway pastime.

The games I had were good, and they kept me occupied. I enjoyed the Mario RPG and grew to understand why the original Pokemon game was so addictive that it spawned a TV show and a multi-billion** dollar empire. I played through the new metroid and regained my uncanny knack for working the D-pad and the B and A buttons.

These were fun diversions, but they weren't quite what I missed.

And then Nintendo released "The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap"

This is how games are supposed to be. For the past month, I've poured myself into this game, struggling with puzzles, searching dungeons over and over until I found the one hidden corner I missed. I've spent days thinking about what I could try next to beat a mid-way boss and then found myself giddy when I figured it out. This wasn't just hacking up octorocks and tectites with my sword. This game actually required you to be smart and think of things in new ways. This game was enriching.

I have yet to finish the quest, and I don't mind telling you that I'm stuck again. This game is damn hard. But it's damn good too. Possibly the best single player game ever made for any console, and coming from an 8-bit connoisseur, that's not a statement I make lightly.

If any of you grew up loving Zelda, or simply spend your days waiting for your train to bring you home, seriously, drop the $80 and pick up a GBA SP and this game. Your train rides will never be the same.

*I should note that I have zero aptitude for high-jumping.

**I also have no idea how much Pokemon has made for Nintendo, between the game, the shows, the cards, and the toys. Billions doesn't seem impossible.

1:21 am | permalink | /technology/games | 0 writebacks |

Rochester Fun

We spent this past weekend in Rochester with Kate and Doug and it was amazing as always. We had a great time playing all manner of games, seeing Batman Begins at "the buck" movie theater, and eating some fantastic meals. The first morning we work up there, we were roused by the strangest music you could imagine. An eerily happy and jazzy voice sang "naaaaa na na na na" and was backed by a full orchestra, then followed by some crazy boppy j-pop (Japanese pop music).

After doing some of the morning ritual (my bag was still being "located" by the airline, so I basically just rolled out of bed and put on my pants), we joined Kate and Doug downstairs where they were already preparing us a great breakfast. The music, Kate explained, was the soundtrack from perhaps the greatest game to ever come out for the Playstation 2, Katamari Damacy. I finally got a chance to play the crazy game at the Museum of the Moving Image for a few minutes a month or so ago. The basic premise is that you start out with a little, sticky ball that can pick up things like paperclips and coins. As you roll them up, you get bigger, and move on to bigger objects (like tape dispensers, then toys, then you know, children, pandas, elephants, buildings, and mountains.)

We went out and bought the game later that day, and it's as addictive as it sounds. We beat the game over the course of the weekend, but the great thing is that they challenge you to do each level better, so there's still tons of playability left, and Sara is actually playing it right now.

Between rounds of Katamari Damacy, we played a little Halo 2, some Apples to Apples, a little Clone Wars Risk, Compatibility, and even snuck out to Vertex, the local Goth club for happy hour. It was great to see them, get to know their new dog, Benny, and say hello to their cats, Vega and Io (I have no idea how to spell this, it's pronounced Eye-oh, and he's the most affectionate cat in history. I was trying to write this post our last night there, and he was so intent on getting petted that he wouldn't stand for my hands being on the keyboard of the laptop).

• Katamari Damacy at Amazon
• Apples to Apples,is an easy pick up game that can go as long as you want. Each player gets seven cards with words or names on them. Each round, the "moderator" reads an adjective, and the other players throw in a card they think will match well with it. Whichever one the moderator picks gets a points. Very good for a quick friendly game, and tons of people can play at once
• Compatibilty a great team game where you pick what you think your partner will pick from a stack of cards, based on a different "topic" each turn. Great fun for up to 8 people in sets of two.
• Clone Wars Risk is a twist on the original Risk, with extra rules that would, in theory, make the game quite different. Not wanting to spend 30 minutes re-learning risk, we simply played with the original rules, and it was as fun as ever.
• View the photos - Ooh, it's album 100, neat.

8:58 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Disappearing Flash in Firefox? A quick Adblock fix remedies the problem!

As savvy web surfers begin to upgrade to Flash 8, they're in for a bit of a rude awakening. If you're using Firefox and Adblock (which you should be!) and upgrade to Flash 8, suddenly flash movies disappear. Instead of the expected movie, you get simply blank space.

What's happening is a conflict between Adblock and Flashplayer 8. There's no update yet from either Macromedia or the Adblock developers, but luckily, you don't have to uninstall either tool to fix the problem.

All you have to do is disable "obj-tabs", those little "Adblock" tabs that hang off the edge of flash movies. These tabs give you easy access to block annoying flash movies, since right clicking on a movie will activate Flash's own context menu, rather than the Firefox menu where your Adblock tools normally are for images.

In lieu of the obj-tabs, you can click tools->Adblock->"List all blockable elements" or hit ctrl-shift-a to bring up a list of everything on the page that Adblock can filter out.

Turning off Adblock's obj-tabs is easy. Just click Tools->Adblock->preferences->"Adblock Options" and then uncheck "show obj-tabs." Refresh your page and voila! Flash is back.

2:05 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

Wallace and Gromit Come to the Big Screen

I've been a Wallace and Gromit fan (and a fan of AArdman Animations) for quite a few years now, ever since catching the original trio of shorts on PBS.

Chicken Run, the first feature film offering from Aardman Animations was decent, but far from the whimsical, oddball fun that Wallace and Gromit always seem to find themselves in.

Finally, Wallace and Gromit have gotten their own feature film and I was so excited upon hearing that news a year ago that I forced myself to forget about the project so that time would pass more quickly. My theory was that my swiss cheese brain would drop that tidbit of information, and Wallace and Gromit would simply be out the next time I thought about it.

Amazingly the tactic worked, and the movie is now in theaters! You can bet we'll be going to see it soon, perhaps in Rochester on our trip this weekend.

In the meantime, you can read the outstanding and lovingly written New York Times review, play around at the official site watch the featurette at apple, and check out lots more great shorts by AArdman Animations at AArdman.com

1:47 am | permalink | /technology/film | 0 writebacks |

del.icio.us links

Selections from my del.icio.us bookmarks

Usually found by watching the feed of what's popular with other del.icio.us members, Oishii!

Patek style tenor banjo

Good site for an alternative tuning and style for the tenor banjo. This style should be more familiar to guitarists wanting to switch back and forth between instruments

GTD Introduction - PigPog Creativity Wiki

GTD - Getting Things Done - is a book by David Allen, giving a series of principles for managing the day to day tasks and projects we all have to do.

Directions for making Dried Apple Shrunken heads for Halloween

Peach Saves Mario's Ass - Kotaku

New mario game staring Princess Peach for the nintendo DS

Mario Unleashed - Google Video

Live Action Mario, Luigi, and Princess Peach take on the marimba.

NYC2123

An excellent cc-by-nc-sa graphic novel, formatted for the PSP but also great for reading on the web

Tobby Pachi

Fun little flash game were you launch a little dog off a springboard to collect gems and rescue the girl. His ears flap in the wind as you launch him towards spikes and over obstacles. Cute.

Fluff Radio

The Fluff Radio Review - A live music, comedy, and talk radio podcast created by the same fine folks that brought you Fluff In Brooklyn - http://www.fluffinbrooklyn.com

Writerisms and other Sins

A Writer's Shortcut to Stronger Writing by C.J. Cherryh

Werewolf - A free, simple, party game

Werewolf is a simple game for a large group of people (seven or more.) It requires no equipment besides some bits of paper; you can play it just sitting in a circle. I'd call it a party game, except that it's a game of accusations, lying, bluffing, second

1:11 am | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

Missed Invention Opportunities: HandEase

Years ago, while carrying home tons of groceries in the cheap, thin bags that Key Foods gives you, I was struck by an invention idea. The thin bag handles were cutting into the joints of my fingers and no matter how I shifted, it hurt like hell. All it would take to alleviate that pain would be some sort of stiff layer that distributed the weight from a fishing-line thin razor of pain to a more manageable handle.

Rubber tubing seemed ideal, and I envisioned cutting a garden hose into 6 inch sections and then slitting it down the side so that you could easily pop the bags in, grab them, and go.

Having spent the first few years of my employable life working front end at Price Chopper, I figured that front end staff (such as register workers and cashiers) could churn these things out from cheap garden hose and then sell them for a dollar a piece at checkout. All you'd need would be a good pair of shears to cut the hose and you've got brand new revenue stream built upon your existing stock and labor.

There's a hook in the sale too - you can sell these little hand protectors as reusable items and invite shoppers to bring them next time, but you know they'll forget. For a dollar a pop, how many people will just throw them in again with the order when they forget?

Yesterday, I realized that I'd been beaten to the punch. Whole Foods offers these same devices (but mass produced in cardboard) for free as you walk out of the store. They're called Hand-Ease, and there's only an email address (handease AT cox DOT net) and the store logo printed on them, but I was able to find the website through google.

Designed as a circle that folds easily into your hand with two creases running down the middle, and made of 100% post consumer cardboard, they're much more environmentally friendly than my idea, and stores can simply order big boxes of them as an added incentive for customers to shop there. Brilliant work.

5:58 pm | permalink | /technology/gadgets | 0 writebacks |

Three Droplets

Watering my plants at work left three perfect droplets on the waxy leaf of this baby cherry tree. I was insanely busy, but sometimes you just have to stop, take a moment, and appreciate the beauty around you.

This little trio sat atop the leaf until they evaporated, being perfect photography subjects as I snapped away. I was even able to get the Empire State building in the background of the last shot.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

11:10 pm | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

The Image to ASCII Converter

As a user of BBSes back in the pre-internet days, I have a special appreciation for ASCII art. Back then, image files were a download you needed to wait hours for (uncompressed bitmaps being prevalent) and then open in a viewer program, either in dos or windows 3.1 if you were lucky.

Instead, images were cleverly crafted from letters, numbers and symbols, squeezing some semblance of UI and page design out of the text only format of most BBSes.

Now, most ASCII art is relegated to .nfo files provided by warez distribution groups. Amazingly, the artform continues to advance - I've seen some of the most impossibly intricate designs weaved around text in those files, despite the crude nature of using other text as images.

A few days ago I added the Image To ASCII HTML Converter to my del.icio.us bookmarks (which you can subscribe to a feed of if so inclined). Today I finally got a chance to run an image through it that's well suited to the artform. Without further ado, I give you the "ASCII snakey worm thing!"

......................................................
......................................................
......................................................
...........................            ...............
.......................  :C@@@@@@@@@@@O:   ...........
....................  c8@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@C  .........
..................  c@@@@@@@8o:..c8@@@@@@@@@O. .......
.................  O@@@@@@O :8. C@:o@@@@@@@@@8. ......
................ .8@@@@@@8 c@O  .@o:@@@@@@@@@@O  .....
...............  C@@@@@@@8 .@O  .8.c@@@@@@@@@@@. .....
..............  :@@@@@@@@@O  o:   :@@@@@@@@@@@@: .....
..............  o@@@@@@@@@@@8o::o8@@@@@@@@@@@@@. .....
..............  O@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@C ......
..............  8@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@8O8@@@@@@@O  ......
..............  O@@@@@O8@@@@@@@@@@o8@8@@@@@@o  .......
..............  O@@@@:    o@@@@@@@@@@@@@@8c  .........
..............  C@@@@8C.     ::cccoocc.   ............
.............   C@@@@@@@@8O:         .................
............   c@@@@@@@@@@@8  ........................
........    .C@@@@@@@@@@@@@@o ........................
.......  C@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@c ........................
......  O@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@8  ........................
.....  c@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@. .........................
.....  O@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@O   .........................
.....  8@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@c   ..........................
....  :@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@:   ...........................
..... :@@@@@@@@@@@@@@8.              .................
..... .@@@@@@@@@@@@@c     ......        ..............
..... .8@@@@@@@@@@c  :O@@@@@@@@@@@@@Oc    ............
.....  O@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@O   ...........
.....  :@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@8  ...........
......  o@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@.  ..........
.......  :@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@c  ...........
.........  :O@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@8c    ...........
............                             .............
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8:57 am | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

Is Capsaicin the Next Ecstasy?

Capsaicin, the "active ingredient," to so speak, of Cayenne Peppers is powerful stuff. Eating it can cause you to break out in a sweat, screaming "whooo!" while your eyes water. Turned into a spray as mace, it can bring you to your knees. Formulated as a nasal spray it can... Clear your sinuses?

Amazingly, the answer seems to be yes. Capsaicin nasal sprays are said to be Drano of the nose, fixing sinus problems that were incurable with conventional medicine. I actually recommended them to my mother after she lost her sense of smell last year following repeated sinus infections.

Here's where the twist comes in.

As you might expect, blowing capsaicin up your nose f-ing KILLS. Anyone who loves spicy food knows breathing out through your nose while eating something really hot is a bad idea, and that's just a whiff of the stuff.

My good friend Sandra tells the story of trying Sinus Buster after getting some from its creator, Wanye Perry on her myspace blog. It's no big surprise that it hurt. The surprise is that she went back for another hit, and couldn't quite explain why.

She's not alone. Lots of people have commented that Capsaicin not only cleared up their sinuses and relieved sinus headaches, but also gave them a feeling of focus and wellbeing.

OnlyPunjab explains that the rush is due to the natural flood of endorphins triggered by the pepper spray, likening the feeling to that experienced by those who have gotten multiple tattoos or piercings, or long distance runners.

Capsaicin nasal spray is like an instant runners high that just happens to clear the sinuses.

Add to that the fact that endorphins are natural performance enhancers, and it's easy to see why athletes are using sinusbuster or another similar product before every workout. Skeptics will note here that firing burning pepper spray up your nose repeatedly sounds like a pretty classically bad idea. It turns out that for all the pain capsaicin causes, it produces almost 0 irritation to the skin or membranes it is applied to. All that pain is caused by a chemical reaction, and capsaicin is even marketed as a topical pain relief ointment under the brand Capzasin-HP.

It doesn't take long for word of a safe, natural high to spread, and you can bet bottles of this stuff will migrate from the locker room to the club pretty quickly.

I wonder how long it will be before we see batches of people outside the clubs in NYC going *sniff/snort* "Aughhhh ohhhh yeah!" and then shaking their heads and pumping their fists in the air, conquering the pain and then enjoying the immediate rush.

• Read more about "Sinus Buster" and its accidental inventor, Wayne Perry at About.com

1:47 am | permalink | /technology/gadgets | 0 writebacks |

Moonlit Clouds

Our first night in North Carolina was amazingly beautiful. The harvest moon was bright in the sky, illuminating everything in the eerie white glow that defines edges but fails to give you details or any depth to the world around you. The effect was much like looking at a frozen daytime, and I couldn't resist snapping some shots.

The way the clouds are rimmed with light here, masking the full moon, makes me think of classic old werewolf movies. I threw a lot of shots away, but these really captured the amazing brilliance of the moon that night. It was like a sun on a black sky.

There's lots more photos from North Carolina in the album

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

11:04 pm | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Sweet Fashions

Dylan's Candy Bar is a crazy candy store on 60th and 3rd in New York City. The store is as much about the experience of shopping and the childlike wonder of being surrounded by more candy than you could ever eat than the actual treats themselves. The posh location and expansive corner windows allow them to do a booming business and have inspired impressive works of sweet window art.

Since the "Dylan" of Dylan's Candy Bar is Dylan Lauren, Ralph Lauren's Daughter, it was only fitting that Fashion Week in NYC would bring some candied costumes, and sure enough, we caught the artist at work this past weekend.

The creations were amazing, covering a wide range of Haute Couture looks and even incorporating an actual Ralph Lauren design among them. Take a closer look at the pictures here. Everything, and I mean everything down to the hair on the mannequins heads, is made from candy.

Sweet.

• View the pictures
• Read about the project at The Costume Cultural Society, which strangely makes no mention of the artist, James, pictured above. The designs will be up through October 31.

11:10 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Open Source Games Roundup 2005

Whew - so it's been over a year and a half since I last looked at open source games at glitchnyc.com and the landscape looks quite different than it did in early 2004.

In January 2004, I was wowed by:

• bust-a-move clone Frozen Bubble
• Tron light-cycle game Armagetron

• the obviously named Bomberclone

February 2004 brought:

• the Arkanoid clone LBreakout2
• lemmings clone Pingus

I would have liked to continue doing monthly spots on great open source games but the truth is that I've been too busy to play many games at all aside from killing time with my GBA on the subway.

One of the difficulties in writing this article is that there is no real resource for finding great open source games. What I'd love to be able to do is sort games by release date, user rating, and other measurements such as look+feel, gameplay, and addictiveness, but currently I have not found such a site. Happy penguin makes a good go of it, but you can't sort all titles by average rating or even really browse past entries. Ideally, I'd also like to be able to filter by titles that have been rated by 10 or more users so that the games rated "5 stars" by the developer or a single excited fan don't float to the very top of the list.

That said, there is quite a bit of development going on the open source game world, if poorly publicized. As with all open source projects, 90% of them don't really get off the ground and stagnate after the lead developer gets bored or hits a development hurdle. I'm a big fan of the SDL engine, which is the multi-platform, open source answer to DirectX. SDL has been stable for a few years now, and the games built on top of that engine which are the exception to the "90% rule" are starting to emerge.

I've found some fun diversions by browsing the games section of sourceforge.net, so without further ado, here's some new ways to waste time on your computer (be it Windows, Mac, or Linux).

Globulation 2

• http://glob2.ysagoon.com/

This realtime strategy game is part risk, part civ III, and part boogers

No really, your army consists of little red slimeballs which walk around and build inns, hospitals, cities, and more. The tutorials are a bit slow, so you might have better luck just starting in and figuring it out as you go, but I definitely had a fun hour creaming the blue army as my cities and armies grew to massive size.

Gameplay

6 of 10 - Too slow for my taste, but being able to give general commands and let the little units get to it was fun.

Visuals

7 of 10 - Fun colors and clean graphics, but nothing spectacular

Addictiveness

6 of 10 - When I have another hour to kill, I'll revisit this game

Armagetron Advanced

http://www.armagetronad.net/

Ride your light cycle, and trap other riders with the wall you've left behind

Everyone gets busy, and the lead developer of Armagetron had to take a year off developing the game, which brought about a new fork called Armagetron Advanced and a flurry of development activity. A year later, the lead developer is back and has joined up with the "AA" project.

The result is a much more slick game than I reviewed last year, and the online play has been tweaked and perfected. Battling against other players no longer depends on your luck in "making the turn" but is now back on solid strategy and good reflexes. To compensate for network lag in this precision timing game, when you're playing online, if you go headfirst into a wall, you get a short window of time to turn.

Turn the wrong way or fall asleep at the wheel and KABLAM! If you manage to tap out the right direction in time, you'll "just squeak in" and get another chance to go after your opponent. It's really addictive, and if I wasn't writing this article, I'd be playing right now.

Gameplay

10 of 10 - it does exactly what it should, and it's dead simple

visuals

8 of 10 - depending on the 3D card in your computer, this game can look anywhere from okay to fantastic. It's still simple colored walls trailing from a "cycle", but the cameras are intuitive and don't distract

addictiveness

10 of 10 - There's always someone better than you waiting online to whup your butt and teach you some new tricks. I think this game is as much fun as Unreal Tournament or Halo without the headache inducing jump-strafe-fire madness. Left and right are the only keys you really need to know, although the brake (back arrow) helps.

Secret Maryo

http://smclone.sourceforge.net/

This Super Mario Clone will feel very familiar to anyone who ever owned a Nintendo

Super Maryo is an SDL powered Mario clone which does more than pay homage to the original. If this were any company other than Nintendo's material, they'd be looking down the barrel of a lawsuit right about now. Luckily Nintendo has been fairly tolerant of fan projects, providing they change the name of the project enough to not be a total rip-off.

I have a few pet-peeves with this clone, as the art seems a bit slapdash and the physics are a bit off from the original (most notably, Mario jumps quite a bit higher than he did in the original games.) I only got a chance to play through the first few levels of this one, but it seems like a fun throwback to have on your laptop.

I'm also excited to see the engines and code behind this one develop further and be available for use in new, creative side-scrolling platformers. Some of the best games ever were built in 2d, and frankly, it hurt my head less when the 3D camera wasn't flying around willy nilly trying to follow the action.

gameplay

4 of 10 - The controls react well, but I'd like to see the physics either match the original or be based on the real world.

visuals

5 of 10 - The hand-drawn feel is okay, but this could be a much better looking game. I feel like the graphics are a place holder while they get the rest of the game in place.

addictiveness

6 of 10 - I can't get enough Mario, so I'll probably play this one again, but I'd rather be playing with a joystick.

Scorched 3D

http://www.scorched3d.co.uk/

The classic DOS turn-shooter is back with great 3D graphics

Turn your tank with left and right, raise and lower your turret to aim, and increase or decrease power with plus and minus. All set? FIRE! Be careful though; if you miss, your enemies get a shot at you before you get another chance. There's tons of different weapons and levels to play here, and this is a great game for 2 or more players on a single computer or online.

If you can't see, hit the number keys to go through the different cameras. I would have certainly liked some of these key-hints in game. I'd say any game with more than just the arrow keys and spacebar to use should pop up an overlay with the keys when you hit F1 or escape, but that's just me.

Once you get the hang of it, the game is a ton of fun, and it can be a hoot to play with a bunch of friends online, taking aim at each other. If you've ever played worms, that game was actually a fun-filled clone of the original Scorched Earth.

gameplay

8 of 10 - there's a bit of a learning curve as you get adjusted to all the keys, but it's pretty simple at the core.

visuals

8 of 10 - lush 3d landscapes are an awesome improvement over the 16 color DOS game from 1992, but, at least on my comp, the frame rate was a little low. Maybe I shouldn't be running at 1400x1050 on my laptop.

addictiveness

9 of 10 - This is another one that keeps bringing you back. You can pick up this game and play a 5 minute set or play for hours and hours online. Scorched 3d is also a great game to play with a group while chatting.

Battle for Wesnoth

http://wesnoth.org/

Turn based overhead army command in a world of fantasy

I've actually played this game the most of all the ones reviewed here. Launched into different scenarios of war, you must summon troops, deploy them, and then complete your mission.

Part of the reason I've spent so much time on this game is the fact that it's too damn hard. Even on easy it takes me almost an hour to complete each mission, and I consider myself a fairly able tactician. I'd like to see my troops be a little more autonomous, and be able to build up to more and more challenging enemies and tasks, and I'm sure that as the game matures the balance between challenge and fun will settle out. There are already a considerable number of downloadable quest files which are a bit more fun than the tutorial mission. Anyone who enjoys risk will probably enjoy this game, but be prepared to sink quite a few hours in.

Gameplay

6 of 10 - the game does what it's supposed to, but it could really be a lot more intuitive. Right clicking on everything to select a menu is okay, but the troops should be able to think for themselves when not directly told what to do. It'd help if they weren't total wimps too.

visuals

8 of 10 - I actually really enjoy the looks of this game's top down perspective, and my complaints about the story-art were put to rest with the most recent revision. This game is really starting to look professional.

addictiveness

7 of 10 - Considering that I want to get back to playing this one and try to find a quest that I can actually succeed at, I'd say the replay value is pretty good, and it can only get better as more players and developers create quests.

The Quake III Engine

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/20/1329236&tid=112

ID Games classic FPS is now free and open source

I'd be remiss not to mention this development in an open source game roundup. Quake III Arena, the game engine that has powered the last few years of great networked first person shooters is now available for anyone to build upon. The announcement was only made in August 2005 at Quakecon, but being able to build on top of such a robust, mature game engine is going to be a boon to the open source game community. I expect to see quite a few games based on the QIII engine by the time I get to the next OS game roundup. I've never been a great fan of First Person Shooters myself (I burned out on Doom and Heretic back in 1997), but fans of the genre will love getting to play this game again tweaked for their system (you should see what people are doing with Quake II, open sourced a few years ago.)

There's also the potential for this to power non-fps games like MMORPGS, much in the way the Crystal Space 3D project has spawned the game Planeshift. There's nothing playable to rate here yet, but I'd keep my eye on any derivative projects in the next few months.

Stacker Blocks 3D

http://stacker-blocks.sourceforge.net/

Tetris with beautiful 3D graphics

Who doesn't love Tetris? Who doesn't love beautiful 3D graphics. This is a rehash of a classic, but it's quite playable, and you really just can't mess up familiar falling puzzle blocks. If you like the game, this is a slick little desktop version.

Gameplay

7 of 10 - Plays just like the classic using the arrow keys. Fast response, nice grid and highlighted drop column make it hard to mess up.

visuals

8 of 10 - The 3D here is both tasteful and serves a purpose. Getting to see the sides of the blocks helps your brain put together what goes where and whether you're lined up with the correct column or not

addictiveness

8 of 10 - Come on. It's Tetris. This is one of the most addictive games on the planet

Open Mortal

http://openmortal.sourceforge.net/

This parody game fulfills one of my boyhood dreams

Mortal Kombat once ruled the arcade, packing kids around to see the real lifelike bloodsport controlled by joystick wielding, button mashing 13 years olds.

Mortal combat was obviously just a collection of images crudely blue-screened and then played back to match the action on screen.

We had a photo developer next door to the arcade in the mall where I grew up, and I always thought they could make a killing by taking the proper snapshots of you in different poses and then put them into a "skin" file to create your own custom Mortal Kombat.

That idea has finally come to pass, and you can play as any one of a bunch of nerds, dorks, and dweebs as they knock eachother about in true Mortal Kombat style.

Best of all, now that we've all got digital cameras, you can take the proper pictures and you and your friends can star in your own Mortal Kombat game!

Gameplay

5 of 10 - It's a bit clunky, and I don't know any of the combos yet, but it plays just like the original MK did. If it's going for accuracy to the original console, it's probably more like an 8 of 10.

Visuals

9 of 10 - Let's be honest. I don't love this game for the beautifully rendered 3D. I love it for the plethora of funny pictures, and the ability to add your own.

Addictiveness

6 of 10 - MK was one of the most influential fighting games of all time, and I'll certainly be back to this one. Once you get your own characters loaded in, I bet this is one hell of a game to have at parties! (Author's Note: it appears that some coding is needed to actually load the characters in. I'd be great to have a "character editor" much like the quest editors available for many games.)

Roundup Wrapup

Well, that does it for this Open Source Games Roundup. Thanks for reading, and hopefully you found at least one diversion in this bunch that suits your fancy. If not, check back at Glitchnyc.com in the next few weeks. There were a lot more games than I could feature all in one article, and I'll have another roundup on the way once I get some time to take them for a spin.

2:54 am | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

Coloring in the Lines

A few years ago I roughly followed one of merekat's tutorials and learned how to add some pretty good looking colorization to existing line-art.

I came up with this little gem, and it was (and is) the most popular thing I ever posted on deviantart.

Recently I've been reading and extremely impressed with Colleen's friend Kilo's 10,000 Drawings project, and decided to get my old skills out of tool-shed and see if they'd gone rusty. She's re-teaching herself how to draw by doing 10,000 drawings (as a series of slice-of-life and fantasy comics) and she's not even 1/20th of the way through and they're already amazing.

After finishing up the color-job on one of her recent comics, I'm really really happy with the result, especially the clouds and ocean in the "reveal" shot of the second to last pane.

I also got a lot more familiar with the free and open source Gimp working on this project, and I feel like I can do just about anything I do with Paint Shop Pro with it, although I'm still looking for the "lighten" and "darken" brush.

• Read Kilo's 10,000 Drawing project
• Check out Colleen's webcomic, Fluff In Brooklyn. Her photoshoot at Coney Island is featured in this comic.
• Merekat's photoshop tutorials will make you an excellent color artist in a few insomniatic nights.

12:02 am | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Weekend fun at the Bronx Zoo

We made our (almost) yearly trip to the Bronx Zoo yesterday, and it was amazing as always. I'm a sucker for Zoo photography, and I always take too many photos, but this time I had good reason. My awesome camera (it's a Canon PowerShot A75 if you're curious) has a great zoom lens, takes wonderful pictures, and gives me lots and lots of control. I'm spending most of my time in manual mode now forcing longer exposures than the camera would choose itself and then taking 5 or 6 shots until I get one in perfect focus without any motion blur. It really makes the colors pop and gives me lots of detail when I get it right.

The camera also allows me to switch to manual focus, and I've been bringing it right down to 5cm and taking some amazing macro shots (as you might have noticed).

I'm going to queue up a few of the best ones here in the blog, but I've thinned the herd a bit already and posted the better ones here

• See the photos

1:22 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Remembering New Orleans

One year ago this weekend Sara and I were finishing up our honeymoon, escaping New Orleans just before a storm hit.

We'd learned a lot over the course of our stay there and had seen how the city had been built to withstand (and rebuild after) storm after storm.

Exactly one year later, New Orleans is getting slammed with a category 5 hurricane, possibly the most destructive in US history. I was absolutely unaware until Wil sent his mojo their way tonight. Good luck New Orleans. Here's hoping everyone and all the wonderful history are still there in the aftermath.

"This is going to quickly go from a weather story to one of the biggest news stories in the world, certainly the biggest either of us has ever covered... Everyone's saying "I hope I'm wrong" when talking about this storm. The truth is that we've dodged this bullet so many times before, this is going to be the one." -WWL TV, streaming live here

...conditions are already deteriorating along portions of the central and northeastern Gulf Coast and will continue to worsen through the night. Maximum sustained winds are near 160 mph with higher gusts. Katrina is a category five hurricane.

Wikipedia's quickly evolving entry on Hurricane Katrina

12:59 am | permalink | /life/travel | 0 writebacks |

Delicious Links

Over the past few years, I've changed the focus of this blog to match my moods and interests. I've also grown my own sensibilities about what "personal publishing" should look and feel like and what I aim to do here.

In doing that, I've dropped many of the "cool links" I used to feature. There's plenty of blogs that do that sort of thing (boing boing and slashdot spring to mind), and I didn't want to simply repost their stuff with some added comments.

That said, I still find a handful of cool sites a month, and my bookmarks were getting really out of hand (and out of sync) between my work and home copies of Firefox.

http://del.icio.us came to the rescue, and provided me with a way to archive and access all my bookmarks in one place. It even integrates with firefox through a very unobtrusive plugin, so all I have to do is right click on any webpage to add it to my list of cool links. I also "tag" the links I put up there so it's easy to search for them later without remembering exactly what they were called.

When I post a link, it gets added to both my "home" and then general tally of what people are looking at. When sites are getting noticed and bookmarked by a lot of people, they move quickly up the ranks at del.icio.us. Watching that feed through Oishii! has been fun, and I've found some amazing sites for CSS web design, acquiring software and media, and other fun stuff. Because the Oishii feed tracks sites that are being bookmarked now (and not just the most popular overall), the signal to noise ratio is just slightly better than random. Which is just about how I like it. These aren't the sites that everyone knows about yet, but damn some of them are neat.

Because del.icio.us provides RSS feeds of just about everything, it was easy for me to syndicate into my blog. It won't show up in the feed, so I may occasionally cross post some of these links here in the main story section, but if you go to http://www.glitchnyc.com and look on the right you'll see a new "del.icio.us" links section that features the 5 most recent sites I've bookmarked.

To give you a taste of what's in there, here's my latest 5.

• The Pirate Bay - The worlds largest BitTorrent tracker
  
• Random - Google Video Search
  
• Revolutionary Venom Line Being Developed by Specialized
  
  crazy looking bikes
• .: UNEASYsilence :.
  
  has info on installing mac on PC
• Agata Report
  

2:48 am | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

Spiderman, Spiderman, Radioactive Spiderman

Lots and lots and lots of spidermen, in the "crane game" at Coney Island. I think this one would make a really fun desktop background. The top left is even kind of dark and our of focus - good for placing icons!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

4:12 am | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Shattered Glass

Shattered glass on the F train. The spider-web pattern just looked kind of cool to me.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

4:07 am | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Photo Fun at Coney Island

Last weekend, a bunch of us went to Colleen's and then to Coney Island for some Fluff in Brooklyn fun.

I was hoping to catch Ravi the contortionist at the freakshow and see how he's doing but I guess that he's thought better of a career in the sideshow industry. According to the barker there, his wife talked him out of it. Hopefully he's pursuing college like he planned. I interviewed and photographed Ravi last summer after meeting him twice in a week by pure coincidence. He's a really nice kid.

This weekend, I took quite a few pictures, and continued on my macro photography and long exposure kick. You can check out my photos here and then see what Colleen did with her set in today's comic here.

Speaking of comics, I hear-tell that our friend Chris Moreno's real ink+paper comic #2 is hitting stores right about now. King Arthur Vs. Dracula sounds silly, but honestly, it's the first comic I've enjoyed reading in ages.

Well, 15 straight hours of coding an IT Help Desk system in PHP/MySQL later, I'm finally getting tired, so I'll close this up before I fall asleep at the keyboard like I did last night.

Before I go, I figure I ought to mention the amazingness that is the picture at on the right here. I didn't intend to do a patriotic photo shoot, I just happened to be in the right spot at the right time, and although I think the picture's ridiculous, it's just funny enough to be my new favorite. That, and I'm really still quite enamored of my tattoo. I guess that's a good thing seeing as I've had it almost 2 years now. I figure if I can make it to 30 without regretting it, I'll have done better than your average tattoo-getter.

"I do not regret the things I've done, but those I did not do." - Lucas, Empire Records.

4:01 am | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Seashell Cluster

Did I mention I was on a macro photography kick? I'm obsessed with the detail in this one. You can see every single grain of sand, down to its translucency and the little glint of light shining off it. This one will definitely also have a round as my desktop wallpaper.

Anyone know what once lived in these little shells? they were about 2 cm long each.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

11:45 am | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Vista

Before I even got 3 feet on my photo hunt, I was struck by the vivid contrast of the blues and greens in this shot. The sky was almost unnaturally clear and the grass was thriving in the sea-spray and the hot sun of the dunes.

I'll probably set this to my desktop wallpaper on my linux machine at home just so I can say I had a Vista on my Desktop long before Microsoft trademarked the word.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

10:45 am | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Beach Plum Blossoms

I was all set to do some snorkeling in the ocean Sunday, but it turned out to be super windy and the surf was up, meaning I couldn't see more than 6 inches in front of me. No go.

Instead I went on a photo-safari, and got some amazing shots of the different flora in the area, the dunes, and the amazingly rich colors of that sunny day. Check this one out in full res, it's all about the macro focus. I've always loved photos with a tight depth-of-field, bringing just your subject into sharp resolution, but hinting at what's nearby with fuzzy images and vibrant colors, and I spend a lot of time playing with it that day.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

9:45 am | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

The Sunset Panorama

This sunset in Cape Cod was unbelievable. Over the course of an hour, the sky turned every possible color,and some I didn't know it can do. In this picture alone, there's yellows, greens, blues, purples, pinks, and reds. It was even more stunning in person.

If you click the picture, you can see it in all its super-high-res glory. This was 6 pictures stitched together, and will be hanging on a wall here in the apartment sometime soon.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

2:18 am | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

The Photostream

I've been taking a lot of photos lately, and I'm really happy with how some of them have turned out. Since I've got my own webserver, I don't need to host photos at Flickr, but lately I've been jealous of the cool tagging, sorting, and photo-stream functions there. For example, check out the "cute" clusters to get a feel for how it works. Neato.

If you want to see the whole bunch, you can check out the Cape Cod photos here, but I'm going to be featuring some of the best of them right here in my blog over the next few days, as my own sort of tagging and photofeed, letting google do the sorting for me. If you check back later, you'll probably see a bunch of photos here, but those "reading the feed" (I recommend Mozilla Thunderbird or Feedreader if you don't have an RSS reader already) will get to play along as I pick my favs and fill in some details.

Enjoy!

2:17 am | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Love Song for A Web Server.

Modest at the time of its assembly, the little workhorse serving these pages is chugging away at 133 mhz. By comparison, the slowest desktop I would consider purchasing this year is 2800 mhz. Beyond that, it's got 128 megs of ram and a single hard drive. Not exactly what you would call robust.

Everything says it should have crumped or become obsolete ages ago, but it's biggest problem right now is not wanting to come back on without an fsck after a hard power outage. Between the influx of searchers from google images and the ever increasing traffic generated by simply being around for a few years and consistently writing articles, it's pushing over 50000 pages a month and at least 5000 unique visitors.

Not bad for a little 133mhz machine.

This would seem simple if all it was doing was pushing out static HTML and images, but amazingly, all of the pages it's serving are dynamically generated, either by php or the blosxom cgi script. My photo archive is even tied into a database backend, something that anyone planning a web sever deployment will tell you you need extra processing, memory, and throughput capacity to handle.

Still going strong.

So thank you, little web server, for chugging away in my basement apartment back in 99 while I learned linux, for staying up years at a time even though something's a bit awry with your harddrive, and for making it through this steady ramp up in traffic. I promise I won't get you slashdotted, but somehow, I feel like you could handle it. Tough little guy.

You've even gracefully handled multiple domains, and running HomelessConnectNYC in a pinch seemed to be effortless for you. Nice work. (As an aside, my little server owes most of its success to the sleek and stable software that makes the most of its meager hardware, those bastions of the Open Source movment, Apache, MySQL, the Apache JAMES mailserver, and GNU/Linux.)

1:49 am | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

Google for Dorky Teen

Hahaha... I was just looking at my webstats and I got a bunch of hits for the search terms Dorky Teen (no quotes). Turns out I'm #2 on google for that search. Hahaha, well, at least its true. I mean, the dorky part... Can I even call myself post-teen anymore? I'm going to be 25 in a month and a half. Wow.

3:59 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

Lex Chapters 3-6

Here are chapters 3-6 of my "always in progress" cc-by-sa novel "Lex." Some pieces of these chapters may have been featured here perviously (that was a typo, but I'm leaving it, it fits too well, lol). With that said, fair warning - depending on your definition, this story may not be worksafe. Don't read if you or your boss is made squeamish by R->NC17 rated material. This story is going to be as gritty, vulgar, sexy, and real as I can make my twisted version the 25th century come across.

Since it's been quite a while since the last Lex post, here's the previous installments:

Chapter 1 (pdf)

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

I awoke in a bed for the first time outcity.

My face was throbbing, swollen and bruised from the falls I'd taken learning on the stripwear. My ribs hurt, too, and I could feel the dirt clinging to my body, crusty in the scabs and caked blood where my body had met the ground.

The stripwear, sensing I was awake, began to organize itself and I could feel little breezes as it swished through the air above my skin, lifting itself ever so slightly away from my body and unweaving itself from the blanket it had formed while I slept.

I know I shouldn't marvel at the technology, we're surrounded by so much of it now. I guess the thing that's different about stripwear is the marvelous gumption of it. Most technology today attempts to hide itself, to become part of the organic landscape, disappear out of conscious recognition.

This house was certainly a perfect example of that. Every detail of the aging mansion was no-doubt meticulously kept up by nanosystems and smart materials. The only evidence of this was the slight shimmer to many of the cracks in the ancient wood. Nearly invisible, you could just make out the spider-web like nanotube linkages in the way they splintered the sunlight as it passed over them. I could imagine the little machines, applying their microscopic wires to keep the structure stable and keep the wood from crumbling away.

See more ...

2:25 am | permalink | /fiction/lex | 0 writebacks |

Samba Not Authenticating to Windows Domain?

I've been bashing my head against the keyboard for a few days at work wondering why our intranet, which is running samba to serve files and to check usernames/passwords against the Active Directory server, suddenly stopped working. I'd figured this out a few weeks back, so having it just break suddenly and not cooperate when I did the "fix" again and again was trying to say the least.

Today, I finally stumbled upon the actual culprit. There is some incompatibility between Windows 2000 SP4 SR1 and the newer builds of Samba.

If you've found this article, chances are you were running wbinfo -u and got the error "Error looking up users". If you turn the debugging level on winbind up, which I did, perhaps a bit clumsily, by editing /etc/init.d/winbind, and changing

you'll find the error NT_INSUFFICIENT_RESOURCES

Although I'm not exactly certain of the cause of this, it seems that the samba daemon is somehow confusing the SP4 SR1 windows box, which summarily closes its doors for a bit.

Luckily there's an easy fix. Simply set

in the global section of smb.conf

Link to the forum where I found this fix. Many thanks to Gerald (Jerry) Carter <jerry <at> samba.org>, for the excellent tip!

11:57 pm | permalink | /technology/linux | 0 writebacks |

Hello Dollar!

Well, things are a little quieter around here for the moment, but rest assured that I've got some stuff brewing behind the scenes that should set up the next few months rather nicely. I'm not one to hype things too early here, but the words Podcast and Invention have something to do with it, although the two aren't related.

In the meantime, I've been spending my self-allotted web-browsing-minutes nightly flipping through the Oishii feed, checking out what other people find cool enough to bookmark. HelloDollar.com is tonight's stand out for its level-headed advice on building wealth. Anyone starting to save (or struggling to do so) should take a look at this blog. In daily doses, advice like "Brown-Bag It to Half a Million" is actually quite palatable, and I like the Author's measured approach to building wealth.

10:34 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Dispelling Kitchen Myths

Okay, two quick posts in one.

First, del.icio.us has been around for a while, but I never really found a need for bookmarking things on a website rather than in my browser. I didn't really "get" it. The appearance of Oishii, which gives you an instant snapshot of what other people are bookmarking right now and how popular they are, made it all sink in for me. Just watching the oishii stream for a few minutes can blow your mind, as cool stuff comes across here just about once every second. There's even an RSS feed for your favorite feed reader.

Watching the stream, I came across "Kitchen Myths". I often find myself combating kitchen "laws" which seem dubious at best, and debunking a few of those was right up my alley. Definitely worth a look, whether you're new to the kitchen or know a few of these "laws" yourself.

12:08 am | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

No Subway Searches

I've ranted nonstop to anyone who will listen about the inherent stupidity of random searches on the subway. I've gone on about the fact that it violates the very freedoms on which this country was founded, all for naught. It will not increase security, only create the barest illusion of it at best.

Luckily, I'm not the only one who feels this way. NoSubwaySearches.org sums up rants into concise arguments and distills speeches and diatribes into handy flyers.

Good work guys.

NoSubwaySearches.org

11:43 pm | permalink | /life/nyc | 0 writebacks |

In a World of Pure Imagination

We're off to see Willy Wonka tomorrow, and I'm half excited and half terrified that it won't be as clever and original (if disturbing) as the first.

A simple comment on Kate's blog solved that:

jellybeanmaggie 2005-07-15 11:02

Just saw it- you'll love it. The Oompa-Loompa songs.. soooo much better! Hurray for Danny Elfman! Anyhow, dont want to ruin it for you, hope all is well! Enjoy the movie :)

Okay. NOW I'm excited!

8:07 am | permalink | /technology/film | 0 writebacks |

The Final Table

Jon was still in the tournament (you may want to stop here and read part one if you haven't already, otherwise this might be a bit confusing), and the final table was all starting to sit in their positions.

The blinds had gone up all through the last round, and they traded up the chips, leaving the players with smaller stacks of big chips. The purple chips were worth 2000 (it cost $20 to get 2000 in chips at the beginning of the game) and they were spread across the table pretty evenly, save for the two giant stacks that came over from table 1. Jon had a purple, 4 greens (500s) and some ones. He wasn't the shortest stack at the table, but he was close.

He played it tight, as usual, and the blinds nipped at his stack, pushing him to action. He had 4 9, not a great hand by any stretch, but he was going to be all in here just on the blinds soon anyway. He flopped a match for the 4, and then hit the 9 on the turn. If it didn't move now, he'd be out of it.

"Once again, I'm going to go on record as saying I think this is a bad idea" He said, laughing, and was called by two of the players with big stacks.

The super-stacked bald man from table one was one of the callers, and was holding pocket 8s, and one of the regulars at the club was holding A 9.

Jon just needed to keep either of them from making another match on the river.

It came up Queen, and we both smiled. I think silently, inside we both went "YES!"

Jon did a little better than tripling his stack, and was now sitting even with just about half the table at 7200.

Play went around a while, and Jon finally hit again with "Miss Slick," K Q suited.

He called for about 4000, and it was again him and the big player to his right.

The flop came out 4 7 K rainbow, and Jon had paired his Kings. Not bad with a Queen to back it up.

The turn was a 3, and Jon checked. So did his opponent.

The river was a 9, and they both showed their hands.

They both had K Q.

"Are you kidding me!?" Jon exclaimed. He sat back in his chair, and turned to the player at his right. "I'm sorry, it's not at you," he said, starting to smile a bit "but that's just ridiculous, that's the second time that's happened to me tonight on that hand!"

He took half the pot, which was about 1600 more than he'd put in with the blinds and some early bets added in.

His cards got tough for a while, and the table got exciting. The stacks were trading back and forth, and several of the players made amazing comebacks from stacks less than the big blind. They played for almost an hour without losing a player. At blinds this high, that was amazing.

The even-keeled play gave Jon a chance to bide his time and wait for the right cards, and pocket Kings rolled up his driveway and honked.

He was all in after drawing another player in, and was heads up against Jack Ten.

There was junk on the board, and by the river, Jon's opponent was drawing dead. A 3 on the river made a pair on the board. Kings and threes to his opponents nothin'. He doubled his stack again.

The blinds climbed upwards every 15 minutes, and by now they were playing with almost exclusively purple chips.

Jon was practically forced to play pocket twos on the big blind, and turned up against A 8. We all waited as the flop came out 4 k k. Jon had 2 pair, Kings and Twos, but an ace or and 8 could put him out of it. The turn was a 7 and a Queen came down the river.

Jon had doubled up again, and the table was starting to thin out.

The blinds marched ever upwards, and ate away at Jon's considerable stack. By the time the big blind came around he was in for 8000, almost half of what he held, and he hadn't even seen his cards yet.

With J 7, he was drawn in for another 8000, and then finally the rest of his 2500. He was all in against the player to his right, who was on the small blind, once more.

The beauty was, the other player had junk too, in the form of 4 6. Jon had read him well, and gone in knowing it would probably be a fair match. The flop missed them both, then the turn came out garbage. All Jon had to do was survive the river, and he'd be sitting pretty to make some money (he was one of 6, and 4th or better split the nights winnings, up to a 1st place of $720)

The river came over in slow motion, and a 6 hit the table.

The other player had paired up. Jon was out.

Jon stood up and we chatted for a few and decided to watch the rest of the game play out. It was very back and forth now, and they dropped like flies after Jon went out.

It only took another 15 minutes for the game to wrap up, and Jon and I said our goodbyes. There was a secondary cash table going, but neither of us wanted to drop tons of money here tonight, and we'd had a great time.

We rode down in the elevator with two of the others from the final table, and all talked about how solid each of the players was and what a great group of people it seemed to be.

He and I were buzzing from the experience out on the street, and as we walked from 57th down to the 40's to get some food, we couldn't stop talking about how great it had been.

Over a late deli sandwich and a panini, we relived the week, and marveled at how filled and great it had been. From the amazing Aquabats concert when Jon arrived to the fireworks to his trip to Yankee stadium, to the RC planes, to karaoke and the diner, and now to poker, we'd filled just about ever moment with good stuff.

I crashed pretty soon after we got home, and we both slept in Sunday. Hurricane Dennis threatened to cancel his flight, and Jon prayed for it to happen so he could stay an extra day, but his flight was re-routed north for plane maintenance anyway, and he was off.

Now Sara and I just have to figure out how we're going to get out to California for our turn visiting.

1:18 am | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Poker Saturday

After playing a few fun rounds of Hold'em on the fourth and at the beer garden, Jon and I were both in the mood to play some serious poker while he was here. He'd also taught Sara and I some cool one handed cuts and we'd talked at good length about getting a nice set of poker chips to replace the cheesy plastic ones I had.

We'd decided to go to Atlantic City Saturday, and we were both sort of looking forward to the experience, but I know I was worried about the cost of the trip and about getting to play at maybe one table before I busted out and was out of money (that I considered expendable in the name of fun, at least).

It turns out that Jon had already been scheming, and had ordered Sara and I a really nice set of clay-composite pokerchips. They arrived Thursday, and I immediately thought that with chips like these, we should hold a tournament to break them in! I invited everyone who might be interested to come and play with us. It was a good idea, but I didn't give people much notice, and many of us had been out late the night before at Karaoke.

With the Saturday home tournament a bust and Atlantic City pretty much out since it was already kind of late, I racked my brain for another way to get our poker fix. I really wanted to end the week-long stay on a great note for Jon, and I was a bit bummed that poker hadn't come together.

Cragislist came to the rescue in a big way. I looked up "poker", and found a friendly $20 tournament on 57th and 7th in Manhattan. I had no idea what to expect. for all I knew, we could be walking into a really seedy place, or it could be the lamest thing ever with 4 people there.

Thankfully it turned out to be neither.

The Manhattan Bridge Club is basically just a nice open office space where they put some poker table toppers on the existing furniture. There was, indeed, a room full of bridge players over to the left, but the other half of the people, and brightly lit space, were dedicated to the poker.

It was $30 to enter ($10 for the club, and $20 for the game) and the $10 got us an awesome space, 3 great dealers, and some seltzer and cookies. They also had peanut butter and crackers out. Seeing as I'd neglected dinner so that we could get one last RC Plane flight in before heading to the tourney, that little protein boost was a lifesaver.

Jon and I had talked on the train-ride about Phil Hellmuth's basic rules for tournament play, and I went in prepared to play only the 10 best hands. (pocket 7's or better, AK and AQ). The strategy worked amazingly, and I made it to the second table because of it. My only deviations from the pattern came when I was on the big blind and got to see the flop for free.

At the first table, I sat across from a slightly European brunette somewhere near my age (anywhere between 23 and 32) and I could swear that I knew her face. I had a feeling that I'd seen her play poker on TV, and she played like it. They other players were wary of her as well, and she was playing a tight game with occasional aggressive moves.

I was on the big blind when she made her next big swipe. I'd been dealt Ace Jack and I'd gotten to see the flop for free.

The flop came up A 8 4, and my heart started to beat a little faster. I had a pair of aces, and I was getting a bit itchy to make a move. A pair of aces seemed like a good place to start, but 2 pair could take me down easily, so I played it light and put 200 on top of the 100 I'd put in on the big blind. I still had a stack of 1700 or so, so it was a safe bet.

A few players folded around, perhaps wary at my extremely tight play and the ace on the board. I was either holding some good cards, or an extremely patient bluffer.

The action came around to the brunette, and she called "all in - no wait!... Arg, screw it, okay." and pushed her chips in. She'd clearly made a mistake, but she stuck with it, looking upset with herself.

I was now in a pickle. I was prepared to drop 300 on a pair of aces after the flop, but not to risk the rest of the evening on it. I could cover her 1200, but it would cripple me. I wasn't ready to be out - Not yet at least. There was still a glimmer of hope. She'd hedged that bet, and didn't seem happy about having gone all in.

The question was - did she make a mistake because she'd put too much in, and didn't want to risk it all, or because she realized she could have slow-played it and sucked us all in bit by bit?

Two folds in front of me, then a call. "At least I'll get to see what she has" I thought to myself as I considered her for a moment, and then stared at my cards.

A J with A 8 4 on the table and 300 of mine in the pot. There was no flush draw and she couldn't have a straight yet, so she either had 2 pair, or was making a big bluff.

I looked at her once again, and folded my cards.

I was both surprised and proud of myself. Somewhere in the back of my brain, I knew she had 2 pair, and that it was time to throw the hand away, but the pair of aces was screaming at me to be played. It was satisfying to ignore them in a way, it meant I was becoming a better player.

The others folded around, and she and the caller were heads up. The cards came up, and sure enough, she had A 4.

The caller had junk, and nothing saved him on the turn or river. I was satisfied not to see a Jack come up. I'd made the right decision. As she pulled her pot towards her, doing slightly better than doubling up, she said "what a mistake!" She had wanted to slow-play it, but jumped when she hit 2 pair on the flop.

Flush with the excitement of playing a hand, I got in the action twice on the next two orbits, hitting great cards. Pocket 7s worked for me and I nearly doubled up, busting the man I couldn't really see to the right of the dealer (I was to the left.) On the big blind, and seeing the flop for free, I'd flopped a pair of queens, and he was in "full tilt" as the others at the table called it, playing anything before it was too late to re-buy. Queens were respectable, and I thought he was making a grab for it, so I called. We were heads up.

He showed Ace King. He'd been playing full-tilt, and came up with "Big Slick." He hit another King on the river, and his luck cost me half my stack.

It seemed like a good time to rebuy, and the extra 2000 upped my stack to 3700.

One more orbit, and I finally hit my cards, once again on the big blind. I had AK, big slick. This time, I got to steal the blinds, and whatever anyone bet before me. If I was going to go out, this was the hand.

I waited, to see what people would throw in before it came all the way around to me.

"Fold. Fold Fold Fold Fold Fold Fold Fold. Well, the pot is yours." The dealer said, pushing my big blind and the small back at me. It was the first time that had happened all night - I hadn't even gotten to show my cards or make a bet. I was ready to go all in on this hand, and I hadn't gotten a damn chance to play it!

I threw my cards down face up, and yelled, smiling "Are you kidding me?!?" I said, a grin breaking out of my face, "I finally get Ace King, and you all fold around without a single bet?!" I laughed, and the table laughed with me. It was a crazy coincidence, that was certain, and we all teased around the table about the hand. We were having a good time needling each other and making jokes.

With a decent stack after the rebuy, I played tight and made my way to the second table with just about 2500 when we consolidated.

The second table was a bit more aggressive, but we were all fairly evenly matched, stack-wise. I'd gotten to join Jon at his table, and it was fun to watch him play across the table while I waited for the right cards. He was playing tight, but well, and made a call or two saying "I'm going to go on record as saying this is a bad idea." Each time he said that, it paid off for him.

My blinds and meager hedging bets attempting to see the flop were stolen numerous times, but I was sticking to my game, and at least I was hanging on as others fell out.

The blinds climbed upwards, and before long I was short stacked with 1000, and the blinds were up to 300 600. Pocket 7's came my way, and I knew it was now or never.

I went all in pre-flop, and was called by one of the players sitting on enough to call me just for the possibility of pushing me out.

We were heads up, and I showed my 7's

And she showed her Ace King. Big Slick was back to haunt me.

I wasn't thrilled, but I had a pair going in. The flop came up 9x 8x 2x, and I breathed a sigh of relief. The turn was a queen, and then finally, a 10 showed up on the river. She hadn't hit the straight, and hadn't paired up.

I was still in the game - patience had paid off.

I survived the blinds, and landed pocket kings about half way around the next orbit. Once again, my call-center went heads up against me.

She threw down Ace Two, "Those are nice," I said, laughing " but I like mine a bit better" as I tossed out my Kings.

"So would I" she laughed.

I don't remember the flop, or the turn, but the Ace on the river will stick with me for a while. She collected the pot, and I stood up and shook her hand.

"Well, I'm proud to go out on pocket kings." I said, smiled, and turned to find some more of those crackers and the peanut butter.

Jon was still in it, and it was time for the tables to consolidate again. I'd missed the final table by 1 spot, but I was pretty proud of the way I'd played the whole night. There were some monster stacks at the other table being consolidated and some of them had the look of pros slumming it to pick up some cash. In a way, I was glad not to be going in with them.

Coming up - Jon's battle at the final table

3:20 am | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Drawing Blind

Anya and Marianne started playing what will forever be known as "The Best Game in the World" at the fireworks last monday.

They would take a piece of paper, draw a head, and then fold the paper down so that you could only see the very bottom of the neck. The next person had to draw the torso, repeat the process, and repeat the process. The art that came out of these was so spectacular, you've just got to see it for yourself.

Marianne's holding a naming contest over at her blog - go check it out and name your favorite, you might end up with your entry printed on some cafepress schwag!

12:14 pm | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Delayed Gratification

Thanks to iWOOT (I Want One Of Those,) Jon and I got bit by the gadget bug this week, and we've been eying the remote control planes since Saturday. But I'm getting ahead of myself. This story really starts about 15 years earlier, in the slightly musty basement of my Uncle Joe.

Uncle Joe was a wiry, pipe smoking man and a wicked sense of humor whose mouth opened diagonally in a funny (and slightly but wonderfully insane) way when he laughs. My impression of him as a kid was always mixed with a caricature of "old age." His skinniness, leathery skin, and fungus encrusted nails made him seem just about as old as anyone was supposed to get.

15 years later, he is still beating us all at horseshoes and swinging from the branches of our neighbors tree. Like many of the older generation of my family, he's seeming younger and younger as our age-difference ratio shrinks.

The world is a bit distorted when you're young, though, and almost universally, everyone has a "you didn't get me that pony" moment - the moment when (often irrationally) you felt the world was utterly unjust. Mine centers around Uncle Joe.

Uncle Joe made the most magnificent RC planes; giant wing-spanned models that looked as though they could fly 1000 feet, and hung them from the rafters in that musty basement. He showed them to us sometime around 1989, and I immediately asked what every 9 year old would.

"Can we fly them?"

Even then, I knew it was unfair and irrational to feel cheated when the answer was no. He'd put countless hours into building and perfecting these beautiful things, and explained that the two times that he'd taken them out, they'd crashed And been shattered to smithereens.

But I was 9, and it all seemed horribly unfair at the time. I would never get to know what it was like to be at the helm of a something that was flying effortlessly above.

So, 15 years later, when the prospect of getting an RC plane up in the air for under $50 became a possibility, it's easy to understand why I jumped at it.

Jon felt the same, and there was no time to order and have them delivered while he was here in NY, so we went out and made our purchase.

I remembered seeing a shop wit all sorts of RC planes and boats in the window somewhere near my work, and indeed we found one on 30th and 8th. The proprietor was a bit brash, but after listening to his spiel for a while, we walked out happy in our purchase of 2 MegaTech Firefly's.

The color choices were green and orange. This is "always wearing at least some orange" Jon we're talking about here, so it's no surprise that I got the green one, and its neon glow appealed to my late nineties design sensibility.

We immediately took them up to central park and few them around in sheep meadow. Jon's transmitter was bad, so it would only fly about 20 feet before spiraling to the ground in "safe landing" mode, but mine climbed and climbed up into the sky.

They work much like the mini-RC cars, charging off the transmitter and making 4-6 minutes flights off of a 2 minute charge. They're amazing fun and I think I've got the RC bug. Even with their limited controls, there's something about the feeling of flying that's incredibly freeing, and there's no denying the satisfaction in realizing a childhood fantasy.

We exchanged Jon's faulty model right after going to the park, (American Hobby Center was slightly grumpy but ultimately very accommodating) and will probably break them out again tomorrow. I can't wait! Ahh the beauty of delayed gratification.

1:22 am | permalink | /technology/gadgets | 0 writebacks |

Blosxom Time Bug and Changing Lots of Permissions with a Shell Script

You may have noticed Glitchnyc.com was a blank slate for the past few hours.

The server went down, and since it's up for around a year at a time, I've never gotten around to worrying too much about what happens when the power drops and I have to worry about a reboot. I simply restart the mail server, apache and mysql, and everything is good.

The only catch was that this time, blosxom came back empty. I've seen this before, but as you may know if you know me personally, I have a memory like swiss cheese, so the fix had fallen right out of my head.

I looked at my file permissions, and my paths, and even blew open my permissions on my testing directory with a chmod 777 -R. After that, anyone, including the webserver, could access anything it wanted in there. Still no luck. Both scripts (testing and live) were affected, so I knew it wasn't just a weird corruption of a file, but I was still at a loss.

After a few hours cleaning and getting things ready for company as well as having some dinner, I sat down to see if I couldn't figure it out.

I scanned the blank site and noticed that the calendar said "September, 1997."

Ohhhhh.

All of my articles are time sensitive, so that I can "time bomb" the occasionally piece here and there (for example, if I pre-date a Christmas article for Dec 25, 2006, it'll show up on Winter Capitalism Day [to steal a phrase from Christin])

Since everything on the server was effectively marked "in the future," nothing at all showed up. I fixed the time, and in doing so, fixed the site.

Now I just had to reset all the permissions on my testing site.

chmod -R 664 testing

Well, that didn't work. Although the files have decent permissions, (6 - owner can read and write, 6 groups can read and write, 0 everybody else can do squat) the directories need execute permissions to let users (like the webserver) in.

I needed a way to just change the permission of the directories and their sub directories, but not the contents of those folders.

A few lines of bash scripting, and it was done.

now just change the permissions of the script file

And run it

Be careful that you'll want to run it *inside* the appropriate directory, as any directories it files will have their permissions altered. You may have to adjust the last "parent" directory by hand.

1:01 am | permalink | /technology | 0 writebacks |

The Streets Are On Fire

There's no better place to begin a story than with the image of the narrator sitting on the toilet, wondering if they should have stopped eating before the third ear of corn last night. No, I know it's hard to believe that I didn't concoct this amazing little teaser, but I'm just not that good, folks. I can't just whip up literary gold like this.

So there I sat, minding my business, when the light dimmed, and then flickered. I waited, hoping the brownout would pass before either of my computers crashed or the fuse blew again. It doesn't take much to pop the fuses in this old building and running the big living room ac and a computer could certainly do it.

I turned the light off to take a few amps load off the system, sitting in darkness as I finished up. It occured to me that the light was flickering under the door as well.

I turned the light back on to find it still flickering like a candle and turned it back off. This was some brownout.

Out in the living room, Sara had already turned the AC off. Something was awry here. All the lights were flickering in a seizure inducing candle pattern. Even the kitchen, which was on a different circuit.

Sara suggested I check the hallway, and I did, and then walked to the hall to see if other buildings were flickering too when I realized it wasn't just our apartment.

I was shocked to see a car on fire directly outside the building. I didn't really know how, but somehow these two things were related. The back of a PT cruiser was lit up with bright orange flame, and our lights were flickering in kind.

I got Sara and we watched, bemused for almost 3 minutes, waiting for someone to act, something to happen. I'd heard "Of course I've called 911!" from a man running around down on the street a few minutes ago talking with other gawkers, so I took him at his word and watched.

It hit me, as we were watching, that it wasn't his PT Cruiser that was on fire. It was the street.

My rational brain kicked in for a second. We were okay to be watching this, and there was no need for panic, but I wanted Sara and I to have our shoes on, a flashlight, and her ring. If our place went up like Double G (the pharmacy / residential building that burned about a year ago in a ConEd underground system fire) everything else could be replaced.

The firetruck arrived and the men all stood in a semi circle around the car with a limp hose. They appeared to be wondering what to do and then hosed off the car.

After a while, fire died down, and the firefighters hosed down the now charred and melted back of the car, and opened the doors, letting smoke pour out from the inside.

It seemed that there wasn't much more to see. We reasoned that our power was probably flickering because the car torched the line above it, not because of a system fire.

Except our power didn't stop flickering. Hearing more noise, I checked on the scene about 15 minutes later to find the car moved, and three great geysers of smoke rushing from the manhole cover holes.

It had been the street that was on fire.

I gave Sara a quick heads up that we might have to move if the rest of the system caught (dust throughout the tunnels can send a fire raging from manhole to manhole, taking buildings with it) but that it looked like it was dying down, and that I was going out to take some pictures.

Snapping a few pics, I asked the firefighters the likelihood of our buildings catching from the fire. The first one I talked to wasn't that reassuring.

"Eh, I dunno, which one are you?"

"On the corner, right there."

"Oh. oh."

"So should we be worried, I mean, if the fire's underground, could our buildings go up?"

"Uh, hey, well, Uhhh" He said, looking like he wanted to say "Yup," but didn't want to cause a panic.

"That's not very reassuring"

"I tell ya what, I'm just a probie, so I'm the worst guy to be asking technical questions. Look for the guy with the white hat and shirt."

"Okay if I take a few pictures"

"Sure, but this is as far as you go"

"Okay"

I snapped a few pictures, trying to keep the camera steady in the extremely dim, smoky light. I finally got one or two by getting down on the ground and leaning against a parking meter.

"You're done" I heard someone say, curtly, to my right. I looked up to see the lieutenant in the white shirt.

"Sorry, I'm done. I didn't think it would be a problem. Can I ask you a few quick questions? That's my building right there, should we be worried?" I asked, diffusing him by letting him do his job.

"Nah," he said, "If you were right here where all the smoke's going, we might not want you there with all the gasses going in. But over there, just close your windows, and maybe open one on a "clean" side of the building.

ConEd came about an hour later with their red emergency truck,and began sending giant roto-rooter tubes and gadgets down in the manholes. I imagine the problem will be fixed by morning. It's still a bit scary to think how ancient the system this city is built on top of is. It's amazing there aren't more problems.

I think this marks the 2nd time I've actually lived up to the name of this blog - "GlitchNYC - a Glitch in the city." Last time was the Blackout - this time, the streets are on fire. And here I thought it was just a clever play on words be cause my screenname was Glitch. Maybe the name was a bit prophetic, or maybe if you live here long enough you just see some crazy stuff.

1:30 am | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Problems with Samba Authenticating to Windows 2000 Domain Controller

I've just set up our new intranet at work, and this time I was determined to get samba working better in our Windows network.

Samba lets you share files from a unix box just like you would share a folder in windows. The one hitch is that if you set this up simply, everyone you want to give access to this folder needs to be listed in your smbpasswd file. Synchronizing the passwords between this file and your windows accounts is a headache even with one user, and setting the password to something different requires the user to map the drive with a different username.

Luckily, Samba provides you with a way to ask the domain controllers on the network if a user is authenticated, and what groups they are in. Setting this up is a fairly nontrivial task, but not impossible.

There's a great howto at samba.org which will walk you through setting this up. If that works for you, congratulations.

If you find that you can't log into your samba share after going through those steps, it is quite likely that in the initial setup (before you ran into trouble and found my site through google) that an earlier connection to the domain controller left some improper accounts lying around.

At the end of the day last friday, I knew I have everything configured correctly, and it still wasn't working.

When I initially connected to the domain controller, smb.conf still had the default values for the UID range to use, which was somewhere in the 16 million range. Now that I had specified the range to be between 10000 and 20000, those leftover values were throwing a wrench in things.

After a bit of searching (read: a day of bashing my head) I finally found a solution.

HowTo fix a bad join to an NT domain where winbind is used: (lifted from this linuxquestions thread and cleaned up a bit)

Stop your samba and winbind servers

Delete secrets.tdb and smbpasswd

Add a line to smb.conf to make it easier to get the login info
rejoin the domain
Restart winbind
test to see if domain users were read
You should see a list of users from your Windows machine. This is nice, but we had this part working before.
If this information shows up without the domain, (for example Administrator instead of MYDOMAIN\Administratior, don't panic. It seems that newer versions of samba will drop the domain prefix when they are properly joined to a domain)
Now, lets see if we can get actual login information
This should show not only your local logins on the linux machine, but also from your windows domain
restart samba
Test the login from another computer

For me, I remoted back into my windows box, and accessed \\intranet\public. It let me in without even prompting for a password, because I was already properly authenticated.

Happy Sambaing!

1:05 am | permalink | /technology/linux | 0 writebacks |

Ants on a Log

I've finally completed the second "Ardvark the Aardvark" story. I'm much happier with this one as a "children's book" as far as length goes, and I think I'll probably put this one together in book form first.

Many thanks to Christina for helping me put the pieces together one night at Arthur's Stellastarr* show, and to everyone who's encouraged this project along the way.

Read the story [PDF]

As always I'd welcome revisions, edits, and new stories or drawings - this is all under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license 2.5, so feel free to share it, remix it, print it, sell it, or whatever, providing you 1.) Give proper attribution and 2.) release any derivative works under the same license.

You can contribute and edit collaboratively right on the wiki

No clue what this is all about? Check out my other posts on the topic

5:14 pm | permalink | /life/art | 0 writebacks |

Fluff In Brooklyn's 50th Comic Fiesta!

Colleen has already hit 50 comics of her hilarious stuffed-animal-roommate-comedy-biopic Fluff In Brooklyn. Zany Delta Burke infused humor abounds in episodes 1-50, who knows what the future holds! The 50th comic came complete with a fantastic party in Brooklyn that the characters themselves attended. Check out the comic and the pics.

Congrats Colleen! You've successfully posted 47 more web-comics than your average web-comic-poster, and 48 more than I ever managed. Here's to another 50!... And then another party. Wink wink, nudge nudge, NUDGE POKE PUNCH TACKLE... Oops, uhh, sorry about that. Umm, here, let me help you up. Oh. Okay, yeah, yeah, I'll just... I'll just leave now. You sure you don't need.. okay, yeah I'm gone.

step step step step... creak... cha-thunk.

creak. "it was a great party, throw another!" cre-cha-thunk.

1:04 am | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

Why Doesn't Obi-Wan Remember Artoo and Other Questions

Ghent, a blogger on starwars.com does a wonderful job of filling in some of the logical gaps that become apparent when you've seen all 6 star wars movies.

*Why doesn't Obi-Wan remember Artoo?

*Why wasn't Leia a "Hope"?

*Why didn't Owen recognize C-3PO?

1:07 am | permalink | /technology/film | 0 writebacks |

The reason my office is filled with empty gatorade bottles.

I just clicked on one of the links on my "Referer" page (yes, I know it's spelled wrong, bring it up with the apache crew), and I ended up at a page that was:

Mostly orange

Very Funny

and Featured Ninjas.

Whoo Hoo! Jon is blogging! I've only read a post or two so far, but hot damn, if Jon isn't one of the funniest guys I know. Head on over to http://shucknjive.blogspot.com/ to check out his blogging antics.

Here's a snip from "Stair Master"

After numerous attempts with lots of trial and error, a distinguished panel of experts unequivocally determined that there is no possible way for me to fall down a flight of stairs gracefully.

My first attempt was weak. I wasn't loosened up and I hadn't found a rhythm yet, so I didn't beat myself up too bad when the judges declared my first effort, "the work of a blind, clumsy fool". I deserved that, the way I fell down those stairs was nothing short of amateurish. I was so embarrassed I didn"t even properly acknowledge the judges table after I landed on my side. Sure, it.s a points deduction, but there was no way I was getting anything above a 3 anyway, so no big loss.

For my second attempt of the day, I thought I'd try and make up some ground, so I began the tumble starting off on the wrong foot. I'm naturally goofy foot, so traditionally I begin my fall down the stairs by misjudging the second step with my right foot. The judges know this, so I thought they would appreciate the effort I was putting forth when I instead used my left foot, precariously planting just the last quarter inch of my heel on the tip of that first step and then letting my body weight combined with the awesome force of gravity do the rest. In the end, it came out looking decidedly un-athletic and contrived, which it was. Still, the judges were being generous when they handed me an average score of 6.7.

My last attempt I had to lay it all on the line if I wanted to have any shot at a medal... Read the rest

10:01 am | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Tux's Long March

There's a new documentary detailing the long journey of our intrepid mascot, and how the collaboration of the group yields so much more than the sum of its parts. The story sounds familiar, but it's not what you think!

Lifed from Pocket Change

9:35 am | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

My Brain is Trying a Mutiny, Screaming Pirate Slander

It's been a long time since I've written a really good song. I have 2 or 3 in my collection that I really consider worthwhile with the distance of a few years from them, and I haven't written one that fits that description since around 1999.

About a year ago at work I became comfortable enough in fact that no one can hear me as I sing, just barely audibly, with my mp3 collection. I paid no attention to the fact that I was singing softly 3 or 4 hours a day, and simply did it for the love of it.

It seems that my little pastime has been a covert training program, as in the past 3 months, I've re-found my voice and pitch control, and I've had a new stream of songs come directly into my head without pre-meditation. I simply start singing to myself and then "pop" there it is, chords, chorus, and a vague idea of where the verse should go.

I've finally filled in the details for one of these little instant ditties, and it's raw, punky, geeky and ultimately pop. I wish I could record and produce a version that matched what I hear in my head, but I have yet to master the art of production. I'm actually considering renting a studio and hiring an engineer to help lay this one down in professional style.

Anyone know a cheap and decent studio in NYC?

Here's the rough-cut mp3 of "Heavy Eyelids". As with everything else on this site, it's under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, so feel free to share, remix, re-record, and even sell it - just be sure that any work you do based on this is under the same license, and you give proper attribution. It's open source music.

Speaking of, if you'd like to see the "source code," Here's the lyrics + chord sheet. If anyone would like to try their hand at remixing this from the original tracks, contact me at WebFront2005 AT Glitchnyc D0T com.

UPDATE: I've remixed it with some serious tweaking to the electric guitar. It was far to "fuzzy" to be enjoyable before. I also played with the levels a bit. Still not pro, but much better. Click on the link above to download the updated version.

1:50 am | permalink | /life/music | 0 writebacks |

Glorious Corn

All I wanted to do was look up how to cook corn! How long do I boil it? 30 seconds to 3 minutes it turns out, about 7 minutes shorter than I expected.

But no, I had to be suckered in to read all about how they won't cook it in Europe because they "feed it to the pigs," how one sweet little old couple still hand picks and drives the corn to market every day, and how hunting and eating the critters that eat their summer bounty in a little town called Punxsutawney spawned a national holiday.

Sometimes I think I'm starting to get a feel for writing by doing this little blog, then I happen upon a piece like this that just blows me out of the water. Kudos, Elaine Light. You write as well about corn, of all things, as I do about the most significant moments of my life.

• Check out her piece "Glorious Corn" at post-gazette.com. It's well worth the read.

9:43 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Geeky fun with LSmaker

A brief conversation at work today gave me a reason to play with LSMaker, a handy Light Saber effect generation tool.

One of my co-workers suggested going to see Star Wars Episode III for what would be my 3rd time, and I responded: "How many times can you actually see it in the theater before you start to believe that your umbrella is a lightsaber?"

"What do you mean my umbrella's not a lightsaber?"

Watch the short movie:

• XivD AVI (Please use this one if you can)
• Quicktime (more compatible, but bigger)
• Quicktime Hosted at OurMedia (Please be kind to my bandwidth :) )

6:18 pm | permalink | /technology/film | 0 writebacks |

Mplayerplug-in: It Just Works.

Wow. I just realized something - I'm an Open Source Nut. I've graduated from Advocate to total fanboy. My walls at work have the Business Week with Linus in a Penguin Suit on it, the Firefox ad we put in the New York Times and two Oracle-on-Linux ads. My white-board even has a crappy drawing of tux on it.

That said, I'm still rational and clear-headed about using what works. Although I run Linux at home, I'm fully aware that Sara basically just puts up with it because she loves me. There's just too many times when it should "just work" and I've got to tweak things to make them do what they should. It's not quite ready for the average "mouse-only" user.

The main place where this is evident is surfing the web. Yes, Firefox is great, but on Linux, good plugins are hard to come by. Apple and Microsoft have a vested interest in keeping their media formats to themselves, and I don't think we'll be seeing Quicktime for Linux or Microsoft Linux Media Player anytime soon. Thankfully, Macromedia and Real are putting out fantastic plugins for Linux, so at least for now, their formats are easy to play. We'll see what happens now that Adobe has bought Macromedia.

Mplayer to the rescue for the rest

Last night I installed mplayerplug-in, which handles any media that the full-fledged mplayer handles (just about anything) and it's amazing.

Installing was as simple as apt-get install mplayerplug-in on Fedora+atrpms. Be sure to follow the "for firefox" directions at the bottom of the mplayerplug-in page)

With flash, realplayer (which is great on Linux now!), and mplayerplug-in, the browser finally "just works" on Linux, and I'm a happy camper.

Linux is one step closer to being seriously "wife" friendly.

5:24 pm | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

Push to Talk

I just remembered a funny story from when I was taking Summer Classes at HVCC:

Excerpted from my comments at Joelle's journal:

My Psych teacher at HVCC was great. He was really down to earth, but didn't take crap in his class. One day some kid's Nextel went off (when they were still really new), the kid looked kind of thuggish, but the teacher was just like "give me your phone," and started talking to the guy on the other side in speaker mode, with those annoying Nextel beeps.

"Hello?"

do-bleep! "Who the f*ck is this?"

"Wow. Well, this is your friend's teacher, he's in class right now. Who is this"

do-bleep! "How the f*ck you get his phone, yo, give him back to me"

The professor still has the phone, and turns to the kid in the class.

"What's his name?"

"Murder"

Silence. The prof blanches a little, and then the class laughs. "You're serious, his name is Murder?"

The kid nods, embarrassed, but trying to maintain the thug machismo.

The prof pushes the talk button.

"Hey Murder, I'm going to give you back to your friend now, but he's in class, so he'll have to call you back"

silence again.

"Huh, I think he hung up on me! He's not going to kill me now is he?"

"Let me call him back" The kid said, and walked hurriedly out of the room going "yo yo, it's okay, he's just my teacher" His Nextel never went off in class again.

Classic stuff

That's what I'd want to be like if I was a teacher.

Wow, I just realized that I really miss teaching. Maybe I should start doing some tech classes in the city...

3:32 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Open Source Fun With Inkscape and SVG

Okay, this is just going to be a quickie picture-tutorial, because I've got a very long text-based one coming out "any day now." Meanwhile, I just want to share the joy that is working with Inkscape.

For those that don't know, Inkscape is a free and open source vector image editor, much like Corel Draw or Adobe Illustrator. Vector editors differ from photo editors in that your drawings always remain a bunch of parts that get rendered, rather than being saved as pixels. For example, if you draw a circle, the file will contain information about the position and radius of the circle, as well as its color and outline rather than thousands of little dots representing the image.

SVG is the free, open standard for describing vector graphics and Inkscape is the best tool there is for creating and editing them. The fact that Inkscape is open source means that you're free to download it and share it with friends. If you have 45 minutes, download it and play along with this article.

First, get the program here. I don't normally recommend getting nightly builds intended for the developers, but the 0.41 build for windows is borked and the latest nightly appears to fix whatever problems it had. Just unzip it in a directory and run the inkscape.exe file.

Once you're up and running, download furboa3.svg. It's the final frame from my bit of fan art at my friend Colleen's web comic, Fluff In Brooklyn. (Take a look! It's stuffed-animals-meets-three's-company hilarity).

Now that you've got Inkscape and a bit of art to work with, lets look at what we've got. (Or at least pretend if you're not playing along...)

See more ...

11:52 pm | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

Single Serving Wendy

Buses are strange things. Last Thursday, I slept at "hotel greyhound" from midnight to 6am on a bus to Plattsburgh and arrived relatively bright eyed and bushy tailed, enough so that I was good company for the friend that I was visiting and didn't feel like I'd been up all night. For all the tossing and turning I'd done, the 6 hour bus ride had been fairly uneventful, and everyone kept to themselves.

After two days seeing my best friend off from college (so to speak, he graduates in 2 weeks) it was time to head home, and I didn't have the luxury of overnight travel this time unless I wanted to go straight into work from the bus Monday.

Immediately, we were delayed more than an hour by our bus, which was stuck in customs at the Canadian border.

I should preface this story by telling you that I stick out like a bit of a sore thumb in Plattsburgh. I was the only one there that I saw wearing any black at all, and due to the fact that I kept my hoodie on the whole time to keep from freezing, I was pretty much all clad in it the entire time I was there.

Standing out in the parking lot, waiting for the bus, I wandered from the sun to the shelter a few times as the weather changed (it fluctuated drastically for my entire stay). After a few trips back and forth, I noticed a girl walking towards me. I was moving towards the shelter of the bus port, and she changed direction to match.

I turned and smiled, which is my default reaction whenever I notice someone on a collision course.

"Can I ask you a question" she said in a pronounced southern drawl. She sounded like Tate, a friend of mine from Texas, did when he first arrived in NY.

"Sure." I said, somewhat apprehensively. I was half expecting a "why do you look so weird" or "do you war-ship say-tan?"

"What kind of music do you listen to?"

See more ...

11:50 am | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Aaaaaand, We're Back.

Well, this little server certainly isn't immune to some downtime here and there, and last week it was down for a few days. The beauty is that google felt so bad about my server being down that they decided to take their's down in a show of solidarity. If that's not nice, I don't know what is.

11:00 am | permalink | /technology/web/blog | 0 writebacks |

Hitachi's Strange Educational Marketing

Hitachi has produced a very weird "School-House Rocks"-type animation to promote their new perpendicular data storage method, which they claim may increase the current space limit on their hd's (specifically their space constrained microdrives) 10 fold.

I've never seen disco-dancing bits before. This one just has to be seen to be believed.

I'd love to know the back-story behind this video. I wonder if some of they guys working on the drives just got bored one night. It's very similar to the HomeStar Runner video for the Bare Naked Ladies "Experimental Film"

11:00 am | permalink | /technology/gadgets | 0 writebacks |

How Ajax (and lots and lots of amateurs) are Changing the Web

Adaptive Path published a piece back in February about the way that smart web applications are changing the web by doing away with the click-reload-click-reload paradigm. You only need to look as far as Google Maps to see why this is a great thing. If you're a web designer or just entranced by how cool not having to wait for Google Maps to reload is every time you move the map check the piece out. It's fascinating.

A few days ago, Adaptive Path's CEO (who boasts clients such as the UN and Intel) busted out with a very "1999"-ish prediction: the web itself is about to change.

The catch here is that Janice Fraser was here in 1999. In fact, she worked for Netscape back in 1996. She's intensely familiar with the whole "bubble" thing and isn't about to be sucked in by one cool new technology that promises to change everything.

Instead, she sees changing coming from the outskirts of the web, growing like a tide. She sees our army of amateur encyclopedia writers at wikipedia, our wannabe news-writers blogging away, our hobbyist geeks churning out open source code. And she's not alone.

Combine that groundswell of truly innovative development power (in the way that only hobbyists can innovate because they've got nothing to lose) with the coming shift from click-reload to true web based applications - and suddenly, her predictions of massive change don't seem that crazy. Speaking from my own experience as both a serious web-surfer and a writer/web-designer, my habits have changed significantly in the past few months. I get most of my "web" fix through my email client, thunderbird's rss reader. I've switched back to doing most of my design in a text editor using php and CSS+XHTML. The web is changing and the way you surf may never be the same. The user has more and more control over the content they consume every day. Some people see the tides of change as scary and threatening.

I say, grab your board - surf's up.

3:54 am | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

8-Bit A Cappella

An a cappella group from Wisconsin sings a medley of the best music of the 80's, and by that I don't mean Madonna or Cyndi Lauper (although Cyndi did kick ass...). I mean the soundtracks to the video games we were raised on.

The vocals aren't 100% but you can tell they had a blast doing this. I wish we'd thought thought of this when I was in school! Check out the video.

11:27 am | permalink | /technology/games | 0 writebacks |

Just an Innocent Picture?

Okay - Here's Sara and I with the Liberty Bell this weekend while in PA for a wedding. Seemingly innocent picture.

Now, notice the guy back here with the goofy "where am I?" look on his face?"

Pan down and look at what's happening with his butt. Someone's either about to grope him or picking his pocket... or both! We had no idea when this was taken that all that was going on in the background!

2:36 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Mukhwas: India's Spicy Little After-meal Secret

Recently, I went to lunch with my friend Sweta at an amazingly authentic Indian fast-food (aka Chaat) restaurant called Dimple. I've raved about the chaat I had there since, but the thing that I've been truly craving is the Indian equivalent of the after dinner mint.

I'm addicted to having a small sweet after eating (usually a single dark chocolate hershey kiss) just to cleanse the palate and finish the meal with a nice coda. Being that the Samosa Chaat at Dimple was extremely tasty and spicy (did I mention I loved it?), I was looking for mint or something while we were checking out.

I saw Sweta reach up to a little bowl, take a spoonful of something and put in her hand, and then pop it in her mouth. After a slightly comical moment of me sniffing and inspecting, I popped a small palmful into my mouth as well.

There's almost no explaining how great this little snack, which I've just learned is called a mukhwas (which means mixture), is. Although mukhwas vary considerably, the two that I've had so far generally contain some combination of spices including fennel, small nuts and or seeds, and tiny bits of rock-sugar or candies to sweeten the mix.

The net effect is something like a natural good n' plenty that doesn't gum up your teeth had has nearly endless flavor, and the texture of sunflower seeds. It's no surprise that mukhwas are a staple at Indian weddings and special events! I'd want this at the end of every meal if I could get it.

Knowing that I'm enthralled with them, Sweta just dropped off a bunch of little "shots" of the fantastic stuff left over from her sister's baby shower.

I'm a seriously happy camper today.

12:36 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

likeAbike = Awesomely simple bike + walking training for kids

I just saw this incredibly simple but brilliant gadget and had to mention it here. It's basically a bike with no pedals, low enough to the ground so that kids can use their legs to push off and balance. It's not quite a scooter, not quite training wheels. Like their site says, it's simply "likeAbike."

I didn't really "get" it until I watched the video, and then I wanted to get one for all of the couples with teeny-tots we know.

From the site:

A LIKEaBIKE has no pedals. When first trying to ride, kids play with their LIKEaBIKE as they would with a hobbyhorse. They become familiar with the saddle first, carefully sitting on it. Soon they start to walk with it, then run. In no time the little rider becomes more confident and by pushing off, picks up speed. If the bike starts to tip, kids instinctively regain their balance with their feet.

My only gripe is the hefty $279 price tag, but I imagine with a larger production run they could bring that down quite a bit. Either that, or they'll be an Ikea version in a few years. (Seeing as likeAbike lays out the prior art right on their site, I imagine this is fairly hard to patent.)

Link lifted from a conversation with Adam, who helped design the site

12:50 am | permalink | /technology/gadgets | 0 writebacks |

Icon 24: First Impressions

Sara and I spent this weekend at Icon, the giant annual Sci-fi / Fantasy / Anime / Gaming / Etc... convention on Long Island once again this year.

It's hard to explain a "con" to someone who hasn't been there. Conventions, particularly ones where cosplayers are in abundance, are safari's for people watchers. There are people of every shape, size, persuasion, sociability, and dress, all crammed into one geeky place together. It's incredible to watch the interactions, and fun to be part of them yourself.

This year, I volunteered to help with the con because I like to be active and busy (and I got a free ticket out of it), but I felt a bit like Steve Irwin jumping into a (geeky) crocodile swamp.

"Well, I've just subdued the angrusgeek, he was a really fiesty fell.. OH WOW, lookit that, ova there is a particularly rare breed - the bifurcated gothling! She's nearly cut in half by that corset, and you've just got to wonder where her organs are. I imagine it's only a matter of time before a swarm of hornigeeks start to... Oh look, here they come."

This year, we decided to join in the fun and actually cosplayed ourselves. It was a lot of fun to put together the costumes over the past few months, and theres something wonderfully validating about being told that some thing looks "amazing" when you've worked really hard on it.

I'll be doing some more "side by side" shots in the coming posts so that you can see what people were going for with their costumes, but for now, you can flip through the truckload of pictures here.

2:41 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

J.K. Rowling Reads and Debunks Elaborate Fan Theory

For fans of the Harry Potter series of books, these are exciting times. Book 6 is on the way with the promise that book 7 can't be that far behind (or the actors will be too old!) and the 4th movie already done with principal photography.

Many of us waited a while to jump into the Potter craze so as not to get caught up in the waiting game, but it's addictive. Once you've read the first 20 pages of book one you're on the hook for the rest of them. Now, we're all caught up to the author and left to stew as she creates, and although she's managing a book every few years, it can seem like an eternity. This has had added the side-effect of creating massive amounts of speculation about and imitation of her works.

Recently, the amazing Knight2King theory, which discusses the chess game at the end of book one as a metaphor for the entire series, has been passed around and apparently even caught the eye of Jo herself! The theory, in analyzing Ron's dual role in the chess game as both Knight and metaphysical "player," comes to the conclusion that Ron must also be Dumbledore.

Expecting people to go "What!?," the authors of the theory proceed to stack up the evidence and speculate on how it might come to pass (or might have already come to pass, as the case may be.) You'll have to read the theory yourself if you want to know more (it's a fun refresher of what's happened to date if nothing else)

Although J. K. directly debunked the theory yesterday, I have this feeling that somewhere in Europe, Jo is stomping around her flat going "Crucio! How in the name of Sirius am I going to come up with ANOTHER ending!" (I like the idea that she swears in her own made up spells and takes her own dead characters names in vain.)

Apparated from The-Leaky-Cauldron.org

2:42 am | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Embracing your Dorkdom

Sara and I were skeptical about last year's Icon, but came back loving it. This time, we're putting a bit more effort in.

This weekend should be a blast, and we get to meet the guy in the Chewie costume! I'm totally going to make the wookie noise at him just to see if he's fed up enough with everyone doing it that he punches me in the face.

1:38 am | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Who Wants to Drive the Yarn Bus?

I just got this email from my friend Josh. $15/hr to drive around and be a sales person, yarn/knitting guru, and media spokesperson. Anyone looking to escape their cubicle, Office Space style?

A very, very cool job opportunity exists with one of my clients. Thanks in part to my PR brilliance (big grin,) Flying Fingers Yarn Shop, in Irvington, NY (21 miles from Manhattan) is quickly becoming the largest yarn store not ONLY on the East Coast, but in the entire country.

About a year ago, I convinced them that they needed to create a super cool way for people from Manhattan to shop their wares. Six months later, the Yarn Bus was born. This is the famed Yarn Bus that has been covered in the NY Times, AP, ABC, The New Yorker, and countless other media around the globe. It's known in knitting circles, and is quickly becoming one of the coolest promotions I've ever come up with for any client.

Flying Fingers is looking for a driver for the bus - someone who likes to have fun, but is responsible, and won't try to pull an Otto from the Simpsons on the bus. There will also be some helping out in the store, as well. If you don't know how to knit, trust me, you will by the time you take your next job.

The pay is $15 per hour, which, by the way, is what school-bus drivers make - so we're competitive. Plus, you'll get all the free yarn and knitting needles and knitting classes you could ever want.

If you're interested, send me an interesting cover letter, telling me why you'd be the perfect Yarn Bus driver. Enclose your resume, as well, either as a word doc or a pdf. Oh, and one other thing - be comfortable being on TV and in the news - because you will be.

Peter Shankman
peter AT shankman D0T com

1:24 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Pink Five

I just stumbled across this funny Star Wars fan-film which follows the untold story of a hapless x-wing pilot during the attack on the first death star.

"Hey Red leader, Pink five here. Wow, this is soooo cool. They totally don't usually even let me fly, but today they said everyone was flying..."

Watch the movie and its sequel at AtomFilms

5:12 pm | permalink | /technology/film | 0 writebacks |

Aftershocks

I was in a rare mood this afternoon.

There was really no reason for me to be feeling so foul, and it wasn't like I'd built up to it gradually over the course of the day. Things had actually gone pretty well aside from a miscommunication here and there, and I was generally in a pretty good mood.

It just hit me.

I suddenly felt like being violent, or crying, or something in-between.

Those who have been close to me for a while know that this isn't the normal state of things. I am rarely if ever genuinely upset or angry about anything, especially to the point where emotions outweigh my rational thought. It's just not my style.

Nevertheless, I found myself in that state around 5:15 today, and I was quickly out the door and walking down 35th street feeling very much like the festering, brooding teenager I once was.

I knew this feeling, this tension in of a sob stuck in my chest and the comic-book-like imaginary flashes of destroying things around me with my bare hands playing through my mind. This was familiar. This was sleepdep.

I've never been a true insomniac, but sleep-deprivation is an old friend of mine that comes to visit every now and then. Sleepdep is slippery little menace that can sneak up on you without you even seeing it coming. If your body needs 8 hours a night, and you're consistently giving it 4, that's going to bite you in the ass pretty fast, but even messing with the littlest details of the way you sleep can be enough to stop you from getting the R.E.M. you need to stay sane.

Don't believe me? Try this simple experiment sometime (preferably when there's no one you like around, as you may offend, or, you know, kill them). Sleep in your clothes, on top of your covers for 1 week. That small change lets you technically sleep, but keeps you awake enough to deprive you of the actual delta level rest you need. Soon enough, you'll be acting like you've been up 2 days straight even though you got sleep a few hours ago. Your nerves become frayed, your emotions hit peaks and valleys way out of your normal range, and your perception of the world changes. Suddenly, a quiet room becomes a dissonant cacophony of whirring computer fans and high pitched TV whine. The subway becomes a nausea inducing roller coaster. People walking the street go from smiling obstacles to grimacing oafs who can't get out of your way.

What puzzled me as I stormed down 35th street was that I'd been sleeping more than enough, but this feeling was unmistakable. I thought back to the previous night, trying to isolate what was keeping me from truly sleeping, and the images came flooding in - thousands of them in a millisecond. My feet faltered and I stopped to breathe the warm, damp air.

I'd dreamed last night.

Not only had I dreamed, I'd had some seriously messed up and intense dreams. So much so that I remembered them, and remembered popping in and out of sleep because of their vividness, only to be sucked straight back into them despite my best efforts to move around and come awake enough to switch dreams.

As I pieced together that night's images, I realized that the night before had been even worse, and the nightmare from that night took my breath away as I recalled making Sophie's choice, yet tragically saving neither person in the dream, only to be told in the depths of my guilt and misery by a good friend that what I'd done, the mistake I'd made was unforgivable. I remembered wailing away in the dream and wondered if I'd made noise in my sleep then, as I sometimes do when being vocal in my dreams.

I looked up at the grey sky above 35th street and breathed again.

Okay.

This was understandable. I was just human. These were just little aftershocks, coming out in ways I hadn't yet let happen while awake. This was natural, allowable.

My feet carried me to the subway, and I crumpled into a seat at pulled out my Gameboy, determined to not have to sit for the next 45 minutes brooding and bored.

I sensed, more than saw, a small... presence... find its way over to me and sit at my left.

"Is that an SP? What'cha playing?" I heard the little voice say.

The boy, who was the size of a seven year old with a face that scarcely looked 4, leaned right into me, peering over my shoulder at my game.

"Is that hard?" he continued, not waiting for me to answer his earlier questions, having answered them himself already.

"Not really" I said, and smiled to him, returning to playing my game while he happily watched.

"I don't really like Pokemon, I played it at my friends house, but I didn't get very far, I like Mario though."

I smiled to myself, partly embarrassed that the entire train now knew that I was indeed enjoying a rousing game of Pokemon: Fire Red, and partly amused at how quickly and utterly this little kid had pulled me out of my funk.

"Jimmy, let him play his own game." his mother said from across the train somewhere.

I leaned back, smiling, and half-whispered conspiratorially to Jimmy "I like Mario too... but I beat it already"

"Ohhhh. I haven't beaten it yet, I've only gotten about halfway through cause I don't have my own Gameboy I just play it at my friends house, but you know what game I did beat, I beat turtles..."

I smiled again at Jimmy, as I stood to give his mother the seat, now that the crowd had thinned and his sister had joined him as well. Jimmy never missed a beat, transitioning to tell his mom all about how he'd beat turtles because it was soooo easy. I'm sure she was thrilled.

The good feeling stayed, and I could feel my shoulders relax and my back release and straighten as I stood there clicking my game and listening to Jimmy prattle on. I imagined that I sounded quite a bit like him about 20 years ago, going on about Mario and Turtles. There was some comfort in the cyclical way these great franchises had been recycled.

Jimmy and his family got off at Astoria Boulevard, and I smiled at the serendipity of the timing. I've ridden the subway thousands of times, and maybe 3 people have ever just started talking to me like that. Jimmy will never know it, but that little reminder of reality, his sharing his gleeful perspective; that was exactly what I needed today.

1:37 am | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

One Bad Apple

Original Sin Hard Cider is arguably the best cider there is to be had here in NYC, and I've been a big fan for a few years now. Their name is clever as well, alluding to Adam & Eve's fall from Eden for eating the forbidden fruit.

Original Sin is pushing their product with an excellent series of edgy artwork by Rich Black (JBSFW:Just barely safe for work) with a campaign of "Sin Here" posters which have been running as full pages ads in local newspapers.

Known predominantly (until now) for creating promo art for musicians and clubs, Rich Black is a master of turning out super sexy fetish-inspired vector art while keeping it borderline-tasteful enough to pass in a mainstream newspaper like yesterday's AMNewYork. If any Original Sin marketing wonks end up reading this, I'll admit right here that I've gone from having a passing interest in their product to being a devout fan. Good stuff.

• Check out the Original Sin posters.
  Rich's incorporation of the OS "devil's tail" motif is brilliant in each of these pin-up style pieces.
• Lots more art from RBlack

2:20 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Banning "Bad Bots" in Apache Cuts My Web Traffic In Half

Well, it's a good thing I'm not advertiser supported, or I'd be severely conflicted over this. I just cut my web traffic numbers in half.

2 days ago I banned a whole bunch of bots from accessing glitchnyc.com to stop "referrer spam." Referrer spam is a way for morally flexible sites and site-affiliate programs to boost their traffic and google ranking by getting their sites into your web statistics pages. Many ISPs generate these statistic pages for their users, and I personally use awstats to generate my own.

To get their links into your statistics page, slimy site owners write an automated script, or bot, to visit your site hundreds of times pretending to come from a site like www.iFreakingLovePoker.com. (Note, not a real site, I don't want to link any of these !*%^#! sites any more here.)

Finally fed up with having 2500 "fake" visitors to my site every month screwing with my actual statistics, I decided to block all visitors with a referer* value that had any questionable words like poker, loans, and hold-em. To be sure I caught all of the sites and many I haven't even seen yet, I define the block-list using regular expressions to match all domains with these words in them.

(*note: "referrer" is misspelled as referer in the apache config file, so I will use the grammatically incorrect but technically correct version in any technical references that follow)

Now, these bots are all happily getting 403 Forbidden errors and regular users can still get my site! I'll have to do some upkeep to add new offending words when they show up, but thats as simple as adding a few more lines to httpd.conf (or .htaccess if I was on a hosted site)

Here's the sections of httpd.conf that blocks referrer spam for those looking to duplicate what I've done here.

First, I define a variable called bad_referers and add the RegEx's to it. Here's a sample:

Next, I block access to my site for those offending bots: (this is repeated for directory /cgi-bin/ and /var/www/html/)

To ensure that it's working, I add my own site to the list of bad referers and test. Surfing straight to my site brings the page up as normal, but clicking a link from my site to itself (which carries a referer value of http://www.glitchnyc.com) gives me a 403 Forbidden. Perfect.

To finish up, I remove my own site from the block-list and add some more keywords to match the rest of the spammers. Watching my logs, I still see the referrer spam, but now they're all getting code 403.

If you're trying this yourself, remember you'll have to restart apache to make the settings take effect!

1:06 pm | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

St. Patrick's Day Funniness

AM New York had some funny toasts from StPatricksDay.com yesterday, and as a guy who has no idea what to say when raising my glass or saying grace, I got a real chuckle out of them. Here's some of the best.

May you be in heaven for half an hour before the devil knows you're dead.

May the wind at your back always be your own

Here's to our wives and sweethearts!! May they never meet!!

I drink to your health when I'm with you,
I drink to your health when I'm alone,
I drink to your health so often,
I'm starting to worry about my own

1:35 am | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Free Schwag With Incredibles DVD

From the Washington Post:

With the swirl of marketing surrounding the DVD arrival of Pixar's "The Incredibles," not buying it almost seems like a heroic act. Target is giving away free sparkling water with purchase; Circuit City tosses a kid-size "Incredibles" basketball to anyone who snags the coveted release; and some supermarkets are even offering gratis groceries. What's next? Complimentary awesome superpowers for the first 50 customers?

Umm, yeth pleathe. (say it out loud fast, it's funny.)

So yeah, everyone who went to the store got theirs yesterday AND got fun stuff.

Well, at least Walmart.com refunded my shipping.

12:24 pm | permalink | /technology/film | 0 writebacks |

"My Preciousssss" or "Making the Dell 2005FPW work under Linux"

I've gotten the Dell 20.1" Widescreen Flatpanel home and holy god is it gorgeous. I basically scored myself an Apple cinema display in black for 1/3 the price.

There were some headaches along the way and I figure that I'll log my work here for any googlers looking to get it running on Linux. For the rest of you, dear readers, I'll resume my normal ranting tomorrow (when the Incredibles finally gets here. What's the point of a preordering when it doesn't get there till the day after the release?)

---

Well, I'm staring at 1680x1050 pixels of linuxy goodness, so I can assure you that the 2005FPW does indeed work. The caveat is that since it uses a new (read non-standard) resolution, most videocards don't have the "modeline" settings for the native resolution built into their linux drivers yet. I have read about problems with the Intel i810 and other i8xx chipsets, and personally had a problem with the Via CLE266.

Although you can set the modeline in xorg.conf, it's worth noting that no amount of settings I could throw at the via chipset (which is the integrated videocard on my mini-itx board) would make it work. Some chipsets simply cannot handle this resolution or will not accept non-standard modeline without some crazy tweaking.

In the end, I simply threw a spare ATI rage 128 in a PCI slot, added the custom modelines, and voila, lots and lots of pixels. It seems that the ATI driver is quite tolerant of custom modeline settings. Read on for the xorg.conf lines you need to add to get this working.

Finally, if you're one of the unlucky few to get monitors with dead pixels or backlight "bleeding", don't despair. These anomalies are a normal part of the manufacturing process and Dell is quickly replacing defective monitors. Just call them if you have an issue, and be sure to keep your shipping packaging, as some people have reported pixels dying during or after the first few days of use.

If you've got a display with strange color problems and "blotches" and are ready to send the monitor back, try gently taking a paper towel and dragging the LCD "gel" that makes up the screen into the thin spots. You may find that you can salvage the monitor yourself and save the hassle!

1:45 am | permalink | /technology/gadgets | 0 writebacks |

Rethinking Coffee Lawsuits

I've always had a negative opinion of the lady who sued McD for burning herself with their hot coffee.

After reading this to-the-point and well thought out post on Slashdot (yes, they exist,) I may have to change my views...

Re:Caveat (Score:4, Informative) by cat_jesus (525334) on Monday March 14, @04:36PM (#11936934)
The other problem with the McDonald's case is the coffee was hot enough to cause third degree burns. It is illegal to sell food in a restaurant that is inedible or dangerous. The lady in question knew she did a dumb thing but she suffered third degree burns on her inner thighs which required skin grafts. She could not afford to pay her medical bills(she was very old and on a fixed income) and asked McDonald's to pay. She was not seeking any compensation past her own medical bills. When the jury found out that McDonald's knew their coffee was too hot, knew people were getting injured and figured the number of people getting third degree burns was acceptable, they stuck it to McDonald's.

If anything, this was a case that demonstrated why we need to be able to sue the shit out of a company when it deliberately harms people.

The devil is in the details.

8:36 pm | permalink | /life/politics | 0 writebacks |

Sneak Peek at Incredibles DVD Extras

Pixar are no slouches when it comes to packing their DVD's with extras and from the early reviews, The Incredibles isn't going to be an exception to that rule.

Check out Yahoo's sneak peek at some of the included extras.

.	"DVD Extra: Storyboard To Life"  -- Director Brad Bird and Director of Photography Andrew Jimenez explain the importance of storyboards in the making of a movie.
.	"DVD Extra: Edna"  -- Director Brad Bird examines the transformation that the character Edna experienced in the drawing room.
.	"DVD Extra: Building Humans"  -- Character Supervisor Bill Wise, Producer John Walker, and Technical Director Rick Sayne discuss the difficult task of creating human characters.
.	"DVD Extra: Boundin'"  -- Academy Award nominated short film from Pixar about a dancing lamb.
.	"DVD Extra: Incredi-Blunders" -- Bad hair and several other animated character mishaps.
.	"DVD Extra: The Making Of The Incredibles"  -- Director Brad Bird recalls his first day on the job.
.	"DVD Extra: E-Volution"  -- Character Designers Teddy Newton and Tony Fucile discuss Director Brad Bird's interpretation of the character Edna.

10:21 am | permalink | /technology/film | 0 writebacks |

Dorking out, Incredibles Style

I'm so ridiculously excited about getting to see The Incredibles again, I'm going to feature at least one bit of Incredibles info a day until I get my hands on the DVD (and then probably gush some more once I get it.)

With that, I give you my review, recently posted to IMDB

---

"The Incredibles" continues Pixar's amazing tradition of infusing every story they bring to life with an energy and vitality that 99% of movies, animated or not, lack today.

The storyline of The Incredibles is enjoyable in and of itself, but the real beauty is in the little moments of reality that are woven throughout. As an example, there is one moment when "Mrs. Incredible" is getting ready to pull off a particularly amazing feat. Instead of having her simply performing the stunt, she takes a moment to psych herself up, going "okay okay okay!" before she begins. These little reminders of their humanity are sprinkled throughout and make the characters extremely easy to relate to.

There are a lot of directions that this story and movie could have gone and it's certainly not formulaic in the traditional Pixar or Disney sense. There's moments of moral "grey" for the characters and the true heart of this movie revolves around the vitality of both the main characters as they enter middle age, and also the viability of their marriage as they "sleep" through their thirties and into their 40s.

Finally, the mini-story of the kid's acceptance and discovery of their powers (itself and allegory for coming of age) adds a real hook for the younger audience, who may not catch the nuances of Mr. and Mrs. Incredible's relationship. One of the notable strokes of brilliance of this movie is that the multi-layered story gives everyone in the audience a character to personally connect with.

I don't need to own many movies. This one, I MUST buy.

4:46 pm | permalink | /technology/film | 0 writebacks |

The Incredibles is Out on DVD March 15th!

Okay, I can't believe I didn't get back to see this movie in the theaters again. I've been dying to see The Incredibles a second time since the credits rolled at our first viewing.

I'm not a total geek about many things, but at this point I'm a drooling pixar fanboy. Every movie that make is infused with fun and life, owing much to the amazing environment they're created in. Sara, Jenn, and I watched Finding Nemo something like 13 times while we were visiting their dad in Virginia last year.

I'm definitely going to be watching this one over and over on the new widescreen display.

4:36 pm | permalink | /technology/film | 0 writebacks |

The Monitor I've Been Waiting For.

This is the monitor and price point I've been waiting for 3 years.

Bought.

Use the appropriate coupon code to get an AMAZING flat panel deal

Dell UltraSharp 2005FPW 20.1-inch Wide Aspect Flat Panel LCD Monitor with Height Adjustable Stand - $487 After Coupon code JL6MK$330H9ZT4 (Exp 3/12 5:59AM CST or 2000 1999 more uses)

Stolen from Cheap Stingy Bastard where there's great deals on smaller monitors too.

4:53 pm | permalink | /technology/gadgets | 0 writebacks |

Fenton's Naked Mom

So, we were watching Home Movies last night, specifically the episode where Brendon walks in on Fenton's mom in the bathroom, camera running and all.

At the end of the episode, Coach McGuirk puts the video on and says "let's see what we have here." As the credits roll, you can hear a phone call where he's placing an order for fentonsnakedmom.com.

Needless to say, someone has registered the domain and linked to various sites and people involved with Home Movies, including Brendon Small himself.

Turns out Brendon is going to be speaking at NYU on March 22nd and it's open to the public. Anyone want to go?

11:35 pm | permalink | /technology/tv | 0 writebacks |

Audioscrobbler - Tracking your Tunes

Audioscrobbler is a combination website and plugin for your favorite music application which keeps track of what you've been listening to.

To answer the obvious "so what" question, once the site has a decent idea of what you've been listening to, it's then able to recommend other groups you may like based on what others who like the same music are listening to.

It also provides a nifty RSS or text feed of the songs you've listened to most recently linked to info about the music on Audioscrobbler, which you can include on your blog (check out the lower right of Glitchnyc.com). The realtime data will also allow them (soon) to keep charts that will put billboard to shame with its accuracy and speed.

The plugins are all free and open source, so you can download them without fear of becoming spyware infected or sending tons of personal data over the wire, and the data they collect is Creative Commons by-nc-sa, so you're free to redistribute it as long as you follow the guidelines of that license.

It's fun to look at the personal charts of what you've been listening to and see just how bad you are with certain artists (can you tell I've been on a Rilo Kiley kick all week?) Now I'll just have to remember to turn the plug-in off before going on my occasional "guilty pleasure" Avril binges.

10:47 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

Gran Turismo 4 is Out

Well, GT4 is out (not be confused with the GTA series,) and I'm practically drooling.

GT3 was the first really amazing game for the PS2, taking racing simulation to a new level. Rye and I spent soooo many hours earning licenses, learning how to find the line and brake efficiently, and just generally beating the crap out of that game.

The only problem was that there weren't that many tracks, so after a while, it was more and more of the same thing. News of GT4 started making the rumor mill almost 3 years ago, and I've been excited since.

Now, after delays galore, it's finally on North American shelves. This time there's a TON of cars and even more tracks. Some of the stuff they threw in here is just crazy!

Looks like Rye and I will have to line up a weekend to go be kids and stay up all night playing this one again.

2:00 pm | permalink | /technology/games | 0 writebacks |

Cool And Eclectic Furniture and Fashions

A few months back, Sara went down to Virginia to see her dad and they went to this fantastic furniture and fashion store called "Cool and Eclectic."

Turns out that they've got a website, and aside from having a crappy flash+popup frontpage, some of the stuff they have on there is awesome.

Jump right to their catalog and avoid the popup.

12:00 pm | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

Remembering Superscript for the Commodore 64

My brother was down for a visit this weekend and we were reminiscing (and bitching) a bit about the "good old days" of watching Rad and working/playing on the Commodore 64 (moon patrol anyone? Summer games?)

As soon as the C64 came up, we immediately flashed back to writing papers on SuperScript, which was heaven compared to typing on a typewriter, and hell compared to WYSIWYG word processors today.

Looking back, SuperScript actually reminds me a lot of Nano (which I'm using to write this article), except for the fact that SS was trying to be a page-layout program as well as a text editor. Getting margins right, working with all the ctrl-key combos and remembering how to do stuff was sometimes nearly impossible.

Unfortunately, there's barely any good sites devoted to c64 applications (as opposed to games) online, but if you were one of us lucky kids to have "The Worlds Most Popular Personal Computer," check out Lemon64 for some serious c64 gaming nostalgia.

1:53 pm | permalink | /technology/nostalgia | 0 writebacks |

Cause' There's Thunder in Your Heart!

Okay - I don't think I've ever been as excited to own a single piece of clothing in my life as I am to get my hands on this tee. 1986's "Rad" was not, on the surface, fantastic movie, but my brother and I watched it something like 50 times over the course of 2 summers in the early 90's, stretched out on the living room floor.

We had it on a tape with Whitefang and 1 other movie, and somehow never minded watching them over and over. The music became the soundtrack to my life, and Preshrunk brings news of a recreation of the very tee that they all make and wear in the film so that the main character can afford to race in the final BMX competition.

The very first time I went out to a club in NYC, they played "Send Me An Angel" the hit from this very movie, and I went nuts. I've since made them play it every time I've gone out since (which I've since figured out isn't hard to do at Goth clubs, as it's on the standard playlist).

FROM: Preshrunk
So break out your Haro, load Real Life's "Send Me An Angel" onto your mp3 player and rock Cru's shirt. Maybe you'll luck out and find yourself a Lori Loughlin look alike before she goes and gets her meathooks into an Uncle Jessie. One can only hope...

$15.95 | PayPal | URL

8:47 am | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

REAL Ultimate Power - Now in Book Form

FROM:Real Ultimate Power.net
Hi, this site is all about ninjas, REAL NINJAS. This site is awesome. My name is Robert and I can't stop thinking about ninjas. These guys are cool; and by cool, I mean totally sweet.

Facts:

1. Ninjas are mammals.

2. Ninjas fight ALL the time.

3. The purpose of the ninja is to flip out and kill people.

If you don't already know what RealUltimatePower is, you've got to go to http://www.realultimatepower.net and check it out. It's part of web history at this point.

The Big news? THERE'S NOW A BOOK, which is awesome, and by awesome I mean totally sweet.

This link stolen from my cool new lunch buddy Jessie. And by cool, I mean totally sweet. Is the joke dead yet? Have I killed it? I'm a joke killer.

2:06 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

Twenty Questions

My parents introduced me to a crazy website this past weekend. 20q.net is a game server that asks you seemingly random questions in an attempt to guess the object that you're thinking of.

Skeptical, I picked Pyrite (aka Fool's Gold) and gave it a shot.

The thing had me at 13 questions.

The technology behind this (presumably a hash table of answers to questions representing each object) is really quite ingenious, and the game learns as you play, updating the hash value for objects as you answer questions others haven't answered before. It also moves down through a "tree" of relevant questions as you play, so that it narrows in on your chosen object.

It's pretty fun to try to stump the machine - so far I haven't been able to!

Try it yourself. They've got a handheld version as well which is pretty amazing considering the thinking power in this thing.

1:34 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

MirrorMask

There's a new movie coming from Neil Gaiman, Dave McKean, and The Jim Henson Company.

MirrorMask "grew out of talks of doing a Labyrinth sequel" and the trailer looks extremely creepy and awesome. Although not the traditional Henson puppets, the computer animation is stylized enough to forgive the "Sky Captain" feel.

But don't just take my word for it...

12:53 am | permalink | /technology/film | 0 writebacks |

IE 7: So Much for Molly Wood.

IE 7: so much for Firefox
By Molly Wood, senior editor, CNET.com

I just read through this, and I think it's honestly a troll article (designed simply to elicit angry comments, which it has in spades). Come on Molly, you can do better as Senior Editor at CNET.

The big reasons IE7 will not "win" completely as Molly Claims it will:

• Only for Windows XP SP2 - what about all the other legitimate windows 2000 and even 95 98 and ME customers?
• What about everyone with a pirate version of XP who can't get SP2 (a bigger group than you'd think)
• What about the Mac users
• What about the Linux users (This group is growing fast, a year from now when IE7 is out of beta, it may be truly bigger than Mac users)

Aside from that, it's almost guaranteed that MS will not play nice and actually implement web standards properly, making web developers choose between "right" and "works in IE"... once again.

Finally, the big hurdle for M$ is trying to make IE secure - but they won't give up activex controls in IE because it would break a lot of their own sites (like windows update), which are part of what make it so easy to exploit.

They'll also have a default install base of really computer-illiterate users, users who don't know yet not to click on the "Your time is wrong, click here to install TimeKeeper" popups and ads. Add all that to being the biggest target simply because it has around 90% of the market, and they're still going to be fighting the same old problems.

Yes, it means Firefox may not be as clear a choice for users of XP SP2, but SP2's IE updates (popup blocking and security enhancements) already did that. What will keep users on Firefox is the familiarity. Once you can use tabs on your computer at home, to go to work and have to "open new window" for every link you want to click on when you don't want to lose your starting page is torture. Firefox has the distinct advantage of being available and secure for every computer you own.

12:02 pm | permalink | /technology/microsoft | 0 writebacks |

Mmm... Everything Bagel

Just sat down in front of the giant torus of carbs that I'm shamelessly calling my breakfast (go to hell, Dr. Atkins!) and I figured that I'd jump the shark with the whole wiki thing intentionally rather than just letting it happen.

With that, I give you more than you ever wanted to know about a bagel

10:25 am | permalink | /life | 0 writebacks |

The Wikinews Crossword

While working at Wikinews editing an article tonight, I came across the Wikinews Crosswords. Apparently someone is putting together daily crosswords for free as part of the Wikinews project released, as all wikinews content is, under a public domain license. This is brilliant!

There's a bit of discussion as to whether it's appropriate for wikinews since the wikinews is not a print publication, but I agree with many others there that crosswords are often topical and related to current news and repeat crossword users will also be repeat readers.

2:22 am | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

From Zero To Wiki In the Time It Takes to Eat A Burrito

Recently I've become pretty involved with The Wikimedia Foundation (the nonprofit organization which runs wikipedia) the wikimedia commons (where Ardvark lives) and wikinews.

I'm fascinated by collaborative writing and once you get familiar with using a wiki, they're really brilliant things. Even the syntax is elegant: to link to another article in a wiki you don't have to stop what you're doing, look up the link, make the href in your html, etc etc... All you have to do is wrap a word in double square brackets, and [[viola]] - it's now a link to the article of that name.

The first wiki I used was the AudacityTeam.org project wiki, and while I was using it I got the idea that there were massive applications for that type of communal collaborative environment outside the open source world. Instead of documenting and discussing an open source audio editor, we could be using the knowledge management potential of a wiki at Common Ground to develop our projects and staff.

I've been toying with the idea for weeks, and this friday I had an hour to kill while waiting for lunch and took the plunge.

Around the time my burrito arrived, I had found the source for wikimedia and was downloading it. I idly clicked away, going through the extremely easy and straightforward setup, and by the time I was done with my burrito, Common Ground had its very own wiki.

If you've already got a LAMP server, installing mediawiki is as simple as

• download
• untar
• point your browser to the directory you just made (which you may want to rename to just "wiki")

I was excited. Too excited, perhaps, but I love it when an idea comes to fruition so easily. I immediately began to tweak it to be CGC specific and added some starting point articles, happily double square bracketing any word that I thought should be filled in later.

The brilliance of a wiki is that those square bracketed words create red links, which means that there's no article under them yet. When a reader clicks on the link, it asks them to fill in whatever information they know. They write a bit and create more links, which invites more people to write.

The entire system is one giant open invitation to users to get involved and add their input.

I've now spent a big chunk of my weekend filling in what I know about Common Ground in an effort to get the ball rolling. There's a lot of writing to be done to really make this a useful tool, but I think there are a lot of people itching to take some ownership of the projects they work in, and sharing their knowledge and expertise is a great way to do that.

In interest of full disclosure, the burrito was from Burritoville, so that thing was HUGE.

8:30 pm | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

Ice Pellets

This is my favorite. Every time there's a forecast for Ice Pellets I practically pee myself.

Why am I so excited about Ice Pellets? Simply because the description is above and beyond the call. There's no need for it, but there it stands, proudly describing the weather in NYC tomorrow on wunderground.

Sara: Ice pellets? Why don't they just say Ice Rockets. Or Ice Daggers.

"Cloudy with a chance of Ice Daggers tomorrow." You know some stiff corporate guys were like "Oh, no, you can't say Ice Rockets." I'd be fighting for Ice Rockets if I worked there. The guy's like "Fine, ok, can we at least put Ice Pellets? (muttered) and if I slip and put Ice Bullets..."

Why don't they just say hail?

Eric: I don't know, but that's the beauty of it. Tomorrow, Thirty-two degrees and Ice Pellets. Awesome.

11:58 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

Wordplay For Graduates

So Sara's recently found a new job, and the guy runs a small business and wants to do his background checking on his own.

That's fine and actually kind of admirable (it's more work than you might think) but it means that Sara has to call Wagner and ask them to send an official transcript.

Here's the problem - when you call the college, how do you introduce yourself?

Hi, My name is Sara, I'm an Alumn... **Screeeeeech**

And this is where the conversation comes to an abrupt halt.

Somewhere, in the back of your mind, you know that the word Alumni is incorrect in this context. The question is, there are a slew of other words that might be right. Alumnus, that's singular, but isn't that just for men? So is it Alumna? Who's ever heard anyone actually say the word alumna in conversation?

Lets ask google.

We used to have “alumnus” (male singular), “alumni” (male plural), “alumna” (female singular) and “alumnae” (female plural); but the latter two are now popular only among older female graduates, with the first two terms becoming unisex. However, it is still important to distinguish between one alumnus and a stadium full of alumni. Never say, “I am an alumni” if you don’t want to cast discredit on your school. Many avoid the whole problem by resorting to the informal abbreviation “alum.”

Sara: So I can say I'm an alumnus, or an alumna. Hmm. Those both sound retarded

Eric: You could say I graduated in 2001.

Sara: Oh yeah. That'd work.

11:33 pm | permalink | /life | 1 writebacks |

Fantastic Wireless USB NewsForge Article

I just ran into a great article on NewsForge about a topic that I've been asked about twice in the past 2 months:

Can you use connected to a wireless network from Linux

The answer is a bit complicated, as many of the newer commercially available cards and USB adapters are unsupported, and sometimes even certain models of a specific card will use a different chipset depending on whether they were made this year or last.

Luckily, netgear's cheap USB adapter (the MA111, available for $15+ on ebay) seems to work well. I got myself 2 just to have them if I need them.

Once you get the little adapter, setting it up can be a bit tricky. There are a few manual steps to go through, but the newsforge article sums up what you need to do nicely.

1:43 pm | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

Who Decides What Software Is Running On Your Computer?

Now, I'm all in favor of Anti-Spyware and Anti-Adware tools becoming mainstream. In fact, I think offerings from all the major vendors from Symantec to Microsoft are long overdue.

That said, installing an application by Microsoft which allows them to decide which programs can and can't run on my computer has a bit of an ominous feeling to it.

I'm sure ADP (who is the company that provides many of our paychecks. Literally.) isn't too happy about their products being one of the first "false positive" casualties of Windows AntiSpyware.

It's an interesting question. How much control do you give Microsoft in exchange for the safety of your PC?

I can feel us inching closer to Palladium *Ahem* - I mean "Next-Generation Secure Computing Base for Windows"

1:09 am | permalink | /technology/microsoft | 2 writebacks |

Placemat Art

Well, I was going to paste up some of the doodles that we all drew at Colleen's b-day last friday, but she beat me to it!

• Tons of Placemat Art. Whoever brought the sharpie was a genius.


• Real photos from the party.
  
  
  • There's some freaking gems in here, let me tell you. I may have a new contender for the "Worst Picture Ever" of me.

Colleen is FurboaJerboa on LiveJournal for anyone looking to add her there or here's her rss feed for fellow rss-loving nerds.

3:20 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

Furboa Jerboa

Okay, I love finding zany things on the net and I love pimping friend's stuff, and today I get to do both at the same time. Both projects below are products of Colleen Af Venable's wonderfully demented mind.

FluffInBrooklyn.com is a new webcomic with a cast of 3 stuffed animals and a microscope. It looks like it's going to be quite funny, and it's only in the 4th episode. Check out the characters page to get a glimpse of what's to come.

(What do you mean you don.t know what a JERBOA is? Man...okay, click HERE and if you want to see a whole slew of um click HERE)

STALKING AND MURDERING OF A CHILDHOOD GIRAFFE is a series of 250+ photos of Collen with various giraffes.

2:05 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 1 writebacks |

Choosing the Right Laptop

Now that PC's are plummeting down under $500, many of my friends are looking to purchase laptops. Perhaps not coincidentally, many of these same friends are living in NYC apartments and have no place to put big noisy doorstops otherwise known as PCs. I've always been a fan of being able to go in and fix problems myself, so I generally lean towards desktop systems, but I'm happy to do some research for friends.

Now, from one geek to another, what you "should" buy in a laptop will differ greatly. Arguments back and forth regarding speed, hard drive size, dvd burners, reliability, and more will get your recommendations from $700 to $3000. Finding the "sweet spot" where you're getting the most utility for the best value can be difficult, but or me, there is only one real requirement. The Screen.

Modern PC's, even pieces of crap like E-Machines, can handle just about anything you want to throw at them. Processors are insanely fast, even default low end hard drives are big enough, and memory is abundant. Everything has evolved so quickly that the normal user will never even touch 90% of their computer's potential. They just want to surf the web, watch some movies, and write a paper or two.

Even as a mega-geek, I'm firmly in this camp. I'm not rendering 3D or movies (and even when I do, I can start a render job and then go to bed), and most of the daily work I do takes place in a web browser, email client, or text editor. My main computer at home is a small-form-factor 1ghz machine that was originally going to be a MythTV box.

The only thing that hems me in when I'm working on a computer is the number of pixels on the screen. I need at least one web browser open to a decent size and a bunch of space around the edges so I can keep an eye on my other open programs and multitask efficiently.

1024x768, also known as XGA, just doesn't cut it for that basic daily work. You find yourself maximizing your web browser and all other programs and you become oblivious to other things going on on your machine, like IM windows popping up or emails coming in.

Most bargain laptops, regardless of screen size, come with an XGA resolution monitor. If you can find a good laptop with at least WXGA (or better, like UXGA, WUXGA or WUSXGA - more letters are better) for cheap, you're good to go.

I recently stumbled upon this deal. AMD Athlon 3000+, WXGA screen, DVD+-RW, for $900? If I had the cash, I'd own this thing already. Even if that laptop isn't available anymore or you want to go with a different vendor, I think the basic specs hold up well as far as what to look for in a great bargain laptop.

Anyway, until I have $1000 to throw around, I'll just have to drool over strongbad's new laptop. If you haven't seen it yet, start with the "virus" email.

3:31 am | permalink | /technology/gadgets | 0 writebacks |

Sorry Everybody

My good friend Alan pointed me to SorryEverybody.com the other day. The basic concept is that everyone and anyone can send in a photo apologizing to the rest of the world for reelecting Bush.

Some of the photos are very funny and Al himself is in there!

2:34 am | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |

Veronica Varlow Vehicle "Revolver" Closer to Reality

Revolver, the brainchild of Danger Dame seamstress Veronica Varlow has moved from a screenplay and some cool pictures to an amazing trailer.

Although it's still not a full movie (they're looking for investors), the trailer sets the mood amazingly and then finally gives us a glimpse of the storyline.

Now they've won the Golden Trailer award which pretty much fast-tracks them to getting picked up by a studio.

Veronica: Jeremy Sisto of "Six Feet Under" presented our category, "Best Trailer No Movie". He said, "A regular trailer has to be good enough to get someone to drop 10 bucks. In this category, the trailer has to be good enough to get somebody to drop 10 million bucks."

And then he said the words..."And the nominees are...."

Read the rest

Our friend PJ just moved to Hollywood to work on big pictures (he's working on "War of the Worlds" right now) and this seems right up his alley. I'll have to drop him a line to see if he's interested. As far as I know, they're still looking for cast and crew.

• Download the trailer (hi-res quicktime, mplayer friendly)
• Check out the movie site for Revolver
• DangerDame.com is the fashion store of Veronica Varlow, where she sells many of the 50's pin-up style outfits you see her wearing in the trailer.

1:29 am | permalink | /technology/film | 6 writebacks |

More Awesome Indie Clothes

While looking for screenshots from BeetleJuice for the Fish Hook Story, I stumbled upon Plastik Wrap, an independent clothing designed with a serious bent towards techno/goth/sci-fi garb.

My only gripe is that I wish there were more men's clothes but the few items they have are decent and the women's stuff is amazing. It's as if Jennifer Connelly's character from Requiem for a Dream finally opened a fashion store.

Check out the Plastik Wrap store

While we're talking about cool clothes, I should mention that Veronica Varlow of DangerDame.com has added some new items since I last featured fashion here at GlitchNYC.com .

Link stolen from Void-Star.net who also has some BeetleJuice and Ragnarok inspired "slashy, high-tech, high-fantasy" fiction going on at her site.

1:13 am | permalink | /life/freak/garb | 1 writebacks |

Audio and Video of Wil Wheaton Reading Just a Geek

I'm sure he posted this ages ago and I'm just behind the times, but I figured that I'd blog it now since I just saw it.

Wil Wheaton has linked to free downloads of movies and audio of him reading from Just a Geek and Dancing Barefoot. I'm pulling down the video right now, and it's flying in at 685 KB/sec. It seems that when RCN rolled out their new higher bandwidth services (7mbps to the home!) their other tiers of service got a nice boost as well.

His readings are supposed to be very entertaining, so if you're a fan at all or just interested to hear some funny stories from a guy who's had a very interesting life so far, give it a look.

10:55 pm | permalink | /technology/web | 0 writebacks |